TR EMERITUS

Our elected MP's monthly allowance is S$16,000. Today, Parliament will deliberate if S. Iswaran (SI) who has been suspended by the pap themselves from all, I repeat, from ALL his ministerial and MP duties and activities because he is assisting the CPIB in their investigation into some corruption cases should continues receiving his MP allowance. Currently, SI is paid a reduced ministerial salary of S$8,500 and including his MP allowance will come up to S$24,500/ each month for doing nothing. ( Please read this paragraph again). MP allowance and ministerial salary do not drop like rain from the sky. What they earn are the collective results of many, many, many thousands of Singaporeans' hard work, long hours of work, overtime work, sacrifices, creativity, innovative work, lesser time spent with their loved ones and much, much more. Hand to heart, I ask if any one of us is suspended from work due to some CPIB investigation, will we continue to receive from our employer what SI is receiving from the pap government? The answer is so obvious. So, I ask loudly what is so special about him? To add salt to insult, too many fellow citizens don't even earn in one year what SI is currently getting from our money in one month for doing nothing! I sincerely hope that our parliamentarians are men and women who are made of sterner stuff and clearer conscience and not easily swayed or yield to clever and cunning arguments put forth by anybody to continue paying SI his MP allowance for doing nothing anymore. However, going forward, his MP allowances could be back paid to him if he is subsequently cleared by the CPIB. I ask loudly too if that is so difficult for the pap government or anyone to accept? Worse comes to worst, l call on and even challenge the pap government to have the courage to lift its parliamentary whip to enable our parliamentarians to vote on this matter according to their conscience. Right thinking and patriotic citizens should never allow and tolerate the pap government or any of its members for treating our collective hard-earned money like free spending Santa Claus using it to favour its own kaki. Think.   Simon Lim      Read More →

If you are a coffee drinker, you should watch this video to the end. Especially if you have HBP, Insomnia and Fragile Bones.     * This video is inserted to push down the older articles as they are no longer relevant. Sponsored content below:   vitag.videoDiscoverConfig = { random: true, noFixedVideo: true }; (vitag.Init = window.vitag.Init || []).push(function(){viAPItag.initInstreamBanner("vi_592618766")});      Read More →

16 Sept 2023. That’s LKY’s 100th anniversary. Great leaders come and go in the flow of history. They come bringing their own force of reckoning in the specific context of their time, with different personalities, but largely determined, strong will, and carrying their own hatchet. LKY has his own hatchet. He once said: “if you take liberties with me, I’ll deal with you. I look after myself because when you enter a blind alley with the communists, only one person comes out alive and I have come out alive.” Well, that’s true. He came out alive and did what leaders of history often do; they transformed society. They are a force to reckon with because, in the words of LKY, “reasonable men adapt; unreasonable men change the world.” You can say that that unreasonable stance is what made LKY, in particular, and the other founding fathers, Dr Goh, Rajaratnam, Kim San, and Barker, in general, the formidable architects of Singapore today. No one can deny that this little kampong dot has evolved through empowering vision and unwavering determination into a bonfire lighting up Asia and the other parts of the Western World too. Sure, you can expect an unreasonable man to stumble and fall. Tommy Koh wrote: “”Although Mr Lee was nominally a Buddhist, he was not a follower of the Goddess of Mercy, but of the “God of no mercy.”” Leaders are fallible beings too, not matter how history reveres them when they commemorate their passing. In any eulogy, you can expect only glowing and heart-warming memories of the rigid body lying in the casket. In Tommy’s view, some of the most important mistakes are the merger with Malaya, imposing a quota on women in medical school, giving priority to the children of graduate mothers for admission to primary school, and even pegging ministerial salary to the top earners of the private sector. Save for the merger and salary pegged, the other policies were eventually dropped. I guess they were some detours made on the way to building a harmonious and prosperous Singapore? However much we resist, we are a product of our time. We work or operate within the perimeters of what is set for us in terms of the state of knowledge, the economy, the social culture, and technology at that time. At times, even for those most unreasonable, so to speak, swimming against the tides can cause us to go under for a while, and lose our bearings. This happens to the best of us. Yet, while the man has his flaws, Tommy wrote: “Mr Lee Kuan Yew was a great man. Without him as our founding prime minister, we probably won’t have the Singapore of today. But he was not perfect and some of his decisions are questionable. We do him a disfavour if we are to build, posthumously, a personality cult around his legacy.” LKY knew this intimately. He demonstrated rare humility in this aspect, although he is viscerally feared in many others. It is a paradoxical mix. The kind where reason synergises with unreason, and serpents blend with doves (Matt 10:16). “During his lifetime, he forbade the display of his portraits and sculptures in public places. He didn’t want the airport or other important infrastructure to be named after him, Tommy wrote. You can say many things about LKY, and he had his share of fiery critics, in particular, people who had been steamrolled by his tough stand. Maybe some parts of his closet are darker than others. But I guess his beloved partner of more than 60 years gave the most fair, if not profound, description of him. Choo was asked in her husband’s 80th birthday in 2003, what was the most misunderstood thing about him. She replied: ““I read somewhere that “few elder statesmen can command as much respect and condemnation simultaneously as Lee.” I will leave it to these writers to argue which one has most misunderstood Kuan Yew.”” When souls are intertwined, through the hammerings on the anvil to shape them, they tend to share the same opinions. Likewise, LKY was asked, “how would you like history to judge you?” He replied, “I’m dead by then. There’ll be different voices, different standpoints but I stand by my record. I did some sharp and hard things to get things right. Maybe some people disapproved of it. Too harsh, but a lot was at stake and I wanted the place to succeed, that’s all. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.” Well, one thing you can’t fault him, his life’s work and dedication for a country he believed in, from the start to the end, with all his heart and soul. He was a fierce realist and a no-nonsense pragmatist. He laid down the rules, followed it to a tee, and never looked back. He was a man who had no regrets. He did say, “What is there to regret?……Do I regret going into Malaysia? No. I believe we had to try...I made the decisions given the circumstances, given the knowledge that I was able to obtain at that time, and I picked the choice that would give me the greatest latitude if it should fail, to find another way out. What’s finished is done.” I believe it is precisely in our imperfections that we get to transform ourselves and our society. In that brokenness, we find the opportunity to change or heal. Maybe we should count it all joy then? Anyway, what is there to change in a perfect world? Even the toilet flush knows when to half or full flush, right? And in the wisdom of IKEA, life needs a lot of unpackaging, reading of the manual, and assembling, often reassembling. We struggle with our flaws, and once we experience an enduring breakthrough within, we then witness that corresponding change in our surroundings. And at the end of the day, when we have assembled it all, and when the pieces are put back into the box, we can then look back and say, “What’s finished is done.” While we are a product of our time, I believe LKY rose up to the occasion. He swam against the tides, to do what he felt needs to be done. Maybe politics and governance for him was like a warfare, and a journey far from home. But he had given his life for Singapore, and I believe he might do it all over again, following the same rules and principles. It was a journey of no regrets. LKY was a stoic leader by all counts. He has taken things as they come, and dealt with them there and then. This is exactly the same way he and Choo dealt with issues between them. “We faced them and sorted them out. We did not dodge or bury them.” This is the stoicism of getting things done, come what may. Let me end with what Marcus Aurelius once said, when asked about life, its meaning, and its length. “Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace - the same grace shown to you.” I trust LKY has made that same exit. It is a grace of not taking no for an answer. A grace that finished the job, by following this stoic dictum in life, “Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.”   Michael Han * The author was a Director at Han & Lu  Law Chambers and blogs on Facebook.      Read More →