The Singapore brand betrayed

MM Lee commented not long ago that the Singapore brand is about efficiency, integrity and rule of law. Maybe he should have been asked whether he felt the Singapore brand has been betrayed by the debacle of Mas Selamat Kastari's escape on that one Wednesday afternoon.


Efficiency was sorely lacking when Singapore's police force allowed Mas Selamat Kastari, supposedly the most dangerous terrorist in their custody, to escape. The details about how he escaped were only made available on Thursday nearly 24 hours after the escape and those details are absolutely stupefying, ridiculous and hilarious. Especially for Singapore.

It was by no means a clever and intricate Prison Break-style escape. Mas was supposed to be escorted to a visit room because his family members came to visit him. He was allowed to go to the toilet (we will assume he was unsupervised) and escaped from there.

Everybody has watched dozens of movies and TV shows where the bad guy is allowed to go to the toilet on his own and then either commits suicide or escapes. But apparently, the Singapore Police Force did not.

Since the escape, the newspapers have been running stories about the measures being put in place to find Mas, presumably in an attempt by the Government to reassure Singaporeans and show how efficient they are now being. But if they really had been efficient in the first place, we wouldn't be hearing about this on a daily basis for almost 3 weeks now.


Integrity is still lacking. Nearly 20 days after the escape, the Minister of Home Affairs Wong Kan Seng has only offered a short statement of apology.

When it was time for the Ministers' pay raise last year, we heard about how supposedly the Ministers are the sole reason why Singaporean women aren't being exported to other countries to work as maids. They said, forget the thousands of people who work in the Ministries, forget the highly-paid consultants they employ, Ministers are the ones who do it all. If I was working for the government at the time, I'd have been pissed.

But apparently their supreme Minister taking-other-people's-credit attitude is not a "for better or for worse" kind of thing. Because oddly enough, we still haven't heard Wong Kan Seng take personal responsibility for this major screw-up and offer his resignation.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer not only has pretty good taste in women but has more integrity than Wong Kan Seng. He screwed (literally) up and has resigned, all in less time than has passed since Mas escaped.


Rule of Law is what is saving and will save Wong Kan Seng though. In any other country, the newspapers would have been on his back, pointing out what I pointed out in the previous section of this post.

But in Singapore, the newspapers are just a sad tool wrapped around the government's little finger. They won't ever say anything bad about the government and won't even publish any letter that directly criticises the government.

And that's the price to pay for a stable government.