The city-state has formally announced that the stratospheric salaries of its president, prime minister and all political appointees will be scaled back.
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It is payback time in Singapore! No, it is not the settling of scores. Instead, it is the paring down of the salaries of all political appointees.
The stratospheric salaries of its president, prime minister and all political appointees have been scaled back from May 21.
This issue which has caused deep-seated resentment before, during and after the May 7 general election has finally been addressed.
To be sure, there is no concealing the fact that Singapore leaders are some of the highest paid in the world. With an annual pay package of US$2.48 million, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s salary dwarfs even that of the US president and other major European leaders. And that salary does not include the bonuses due to him, which traditionally is paid at the end of every year.
His other ministers, too, command equally high jaw-dropping amounts. President SR Nathan, despite being a figure head, draws a salary slighly higher than Hsien Loong.
“At just 1.4% of the Gross Domestic Product, you are getting a good government,” the nation’s founding father and first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew once reportedlytold his countrymen.
Celestial Pay Scales
Kuan Yew himself was the architect of those celestial pay scales. During a parliamentary debate in 1985, he argued that high salaries were necessary to prevent “knaves, rogues and fools” from entering Parliament.
But that was in 1985. A year later in 1986, the country’s National Development Minister, Teh Cheang Wan, whom Lee declared he would have made his business manager if Teh was running a corporation, committed suicide after it was revealed that he was being investigated for corruption.
Many in Singapore were stunned at the news that one of their ministers had taken his own life. What was even bewildering was that the circumstances leading to his death were but a classic instance of knavery amidst all the high salaries and perks he enjoyed as a cabinet minister.
In all fairness, there are as yet very little documented instances of the knaves, rogues and fools Kuan Yew once feared about in today’s Singapore.
The science of what constitutes happiness, satisfaction and, above all, how much is actually too much is rarely understood. It was perhaps the abstract nature of defining what is equitable and fair that is now lying at the heart of all the ferment in the tiny city-state.
Singapore’s system is unique in that the salaries of ministers, junior ministers and rookie ministers are all benchmarked against the median income brackets of some leading private sector professions including law, banking, engineering, and manufacturing.
Lesser Global Responsibilities
Any notion that politics and public service are to be a calling, to be infused with a missionary sense of zeal, was rubbished off a long time ago when Kuan Yew made his famous “knaves, rogues and fools” speech. In its stead is the allure of unusually high salaries for not so “unusually” high office.
All this means that regardless of whether the country sinks into a recession or not, Singapore ministers will continue receiving the same salaries.
By any reckoning, Hsien Loong’s annual wages are considerably higher than the US president. That’s despite the well-publicised fact that he has considerably far lesser global responsibilities than what a US president is expected to accomplish.
Updated accounts of how people generally are faring and their quality of living in Singapore are non-existent at the time of writing. But the sight of ageing, gaunt and infirm people waiting at tables in restaurants, cleaning up streets and pushing carts in the airport confirms long-standing angst that wages for ordinary Singaporeans have not kept pace with economic progress.
It also confirms that the divide between the haves and have-nots has widened over the last few years. Earlier this year strident calls were made by activists to address the wage issue by imposing a minimum wage regime. As expected, it was shot down.
If there was indeed “pain” that should have been felt, it was not felt by the powers to be. But, oddly it took an election and the withdrawal of general support for the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) for it to come around.
It just has to be payback time for the PAP!
Maxwell Coopers in a freelance writer based in Singapore
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