Indian Muslims are Malay. Appointed President is elected. Elections can be won without a vote. Resigning just a month means you are independent.
These irregularities turned into a reality and jolted many Singaporeans into realising that the country they called a democracy is actually a dictatorship. Under whose dictatorship then? Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his cronies.
Unfortunately the power weld by the dictator is not limited to himself, unlike his father’s time. Back then, Lee Kuan Yew was the sole leader whose words overwrite everyone, even of senior ministers. Lee Hsien Loong however created a consensus dictatorship and shared his dictatorship powers to his cronies.
Lee Hsien Loong’s ineffectual leadership gave rise to demons like Law Minister K Shanmugam, Minister of National Development Lawrence Wong and Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan, who acted like mini-dictators circling around the king. Like the eunuchs of a corrupted dynasty, the three corrupted ministers jeopardised the country’s judiciary system, town council system and public transport system.
Under Law Minister K Shanmugam, a crony Attorney General who was Lee Hsien Loong’s former private lawyer was appointed, the High Court was unable to define the first elected President without deferring to the Lee Hsien Loong-controlled Parliament, and the Parliament can twist facts because it is a “policy’s decision”.
Minister of National Development Lawrence Wong openly abused his ministerial powers to set Opposition Workers’ Party MPs up for corruption. The devious Minister for his smirk in Parliament known denied the WP Town Councils funding, then accuse them of not meeting sinking fund payment obligations. Minister Lawrence Wong is now looking to unseat 3 WP MPs – Low Thia Kiang, Sylvia Lim and Pritam Singh – by charging them of misappropriating S$33 milion in town council payments.
Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan is probably the worst among them all, doing next to nothing to fix the train system and even have the cheek to ask for a 7 year extension. When under intense public scrutiny over the increasing train disruptions, Khaw Boon Wan went into full denial mode: accusing the media of being tabloid, insisting that rail reliability is improving and using his fabricated fake news data to propose a fare raise. The superstitious Transport Minister even resorted to hiring religious leaders to pray for the broken public transport system.
Topping the corruption ladder is Lee Hsien Loong, who puts himself as the unchallenged Prime Minister, Chairman of GIC, his wife Ho Ching as Temasek Holdings CEO, and empowering his Prime Minister’s Office with the corruption bureau CPIB, election department and Monetary Authority of Singapore under his charge, for more than 14 years.
The present state of affairs is a dark age for Singapore no better than the colonial times. Many Singaporeans are facing arrests from criticising the dictatorship, and a number has went into exile including Lee Hsien Loong’s nephew Li Shengwu and younger brother Lee Hsien Yang. States Times Review editor Alex Tan is also in self-exile in Australia, CPF writer Roy Ngerng is in self-exile in Taiwan and Youtube film maker Amos Yee is a political asylum seeker in US.
A change is unlikely to happen and the dictatorship will continue to endure in coming years as many “agents of change” leave the country fearing persecution while elections continue to be fixed with newer regulations to give the ruling party an edge no opposition party can catch up with. Many Singaporeans still in the city are hoping for divine intervention. When news of Lee Hsien Loong’s prostate cancer hit headlines, many rejoiced but only to to be disappointed that Lee Hsien Loong survived his third cancer. Obscenely rich as these corrupted dictators may be, death is the only equaliser.