COMMENT: Wake-up call for PM and Cabinet
A Singaporean resident watches a live televised speech by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong after he became ill during a National Day Rally on August 21, 2016. (AFP/Roslan Rahman)
The Singapore Cabinet is a perfect advertisement for healthy living. Looking at the pictures of the ministers makes you want to say: Wah, they take care of themselves very well.
See how slim the waistlines of Lee Hsien Loong, Teo Chee Hian, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Vivian Balakrishnan and even the 75-year-old Goh Chok Tong are.
Lee Kuan Yew started the fit and trim regime soon after he became PM in 1959. He was such a health freak that he stopped smoking, was very mindful about his diet, exercised on his bike and swam daily, and even made sure that his beer was of a certain temperature.
The one thing he didn’t teach his Cabinet colleagues was how to control stress. Maybe, that is unteachable.
It was stress that brought Finance Minister Heng Swee Kiat’s to his knees when he had a stroke during a Cabinet meeting in May. He had carried an “incredible” burden, said Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam.
“I have been telling him that he was overworking so much that it will affect his health” – those words by Shanmugam turned out to be prophetic.
And on Sunday came another scare. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s near-collapse while making the country’s most important speech to the nation, though not serious, was more dramatic. The scary moments were there for every one to watch with disbelief.
He has had two health scares before – when he was stricken with lymphoma cancer in 1992 and when he had to undergo prostate operation in February last year.
Rethinking approach to work
The time has come for the PM and his Cabinet colleagues to rethink their attitude towards work. There is no doubt that the work load of the Cabinet has gone up many notches in the last few years as Singapore is at the cusp of dramatic political, social and economic challenges.
We jumped on the globalisation bandwagon without thinking through the heartache it was causing our fellow citizens.
The 2011 General Election result was a god-send to the PAP as it saw the anger of the voters in full flourish over an immigration policy that was so focussed on bringing in foreigners to keep the economy growing at all cost.
What we are seeing in Britain over Brexit, in the US over the appeal of an irrational Donald Trump and in the Philippines over the voters giving Duterte the licence to kill could have happened in Singapore.
The 2011 result put a brake to that as the PAP government decided to move left of centre and try to ease the pain of those hit by a very liberal immigration policy.
The Cabinet is focussed on making sure that Singapore doesn’t fall into this trap. That calls for a Herculean task as the country has to stretch itself to find out-of-the-box solutions.
And such solutions are not easy to come by as Singapore is constrained by its size and its people’s inability to bring in the moolah for the country.
Critical leadership stage
Leadership succession planning is at a critical point with the next PM not in sight. The pressure is on to find a successor by 2020 as the PM showed again on Sunday that a new team should be able to take over soon after the next election.
Heng is a victim of that compressed timeline to find a successor. And the PM was the next as exhaustion put paid to his slim-and-fit outside appearance.
Who will be the next?
With the high salaries they are paid and expectations of them skyrocketing, they are forced to work overtime not just in policy initiatives but in community work, too.
One unintended effect of this is the signal it sends out to potential PAP candidates. One of them who is being wooed assiduously told: “Watching PM on TV, I couldn’t help but think whether this is all worth it.”
The Cabinet needs a serious health check. And only the PM can provide it.
P N Balji is a veteran Singaporean journalist who is the former chief editor of TODAY newspaper, and a media consultant. The views expressed are his own.
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