SINGAPORE, Nov 2 — Last week, bloggers cum activists Roy Ngerng and Han Hui Hui were formally charged with being a public nuisance.
It is alleged that their most recent “Return our CPF” protest disrupted a charity carnival for special needs children.
And Singaporeans everywhere had a field day discussing this (including me) but actually here’s the real question: Why do we care so much?
How come 33-year-old Ngerng — a former hospital administrator — and Han Hui, his even younger lawyer sidekick, are the most visible faces of a campaign for greater government transparency in Singapore?
I remember a time when a walk down Orchard Road would not be complete unless you ran into the formidable JB Jeyaratnam standing on the sidewalk waving a copy of The Hatchet Man and demanding attention.
Yesterday, for the purpose of this column, I asked a handful of my colleagues — all young Singaporeans ranging in age from 18 to 29 — to name one Opposition leader in Singapore today.
On the results of this somewhat unscientific survey I found that less than one in 20 of my young colleagues could name a single Opposition political party. The closest to correct were a young man who mumbled, “Oh I know, that guy lah — the old ‘botak’ guy who is with that party with the hammer” and another girl who said “Yah, that young pretty woman.”
To be fair to the Opposition parties, yet another girl I polled told me confidently that our current prime minister was Lee Kuan Yew and the Opposition is the PAP, so this could be part of a larger problem of political apathy.
Though initially amusing, the reality is that this level of apathy amongst the nation’s young people is close to a calamity. Particularly for the Opposition as young people with no residual loyalty to the incumbent government and aspirations for change should comprise the core of the Opposition’s voter base.
Despite the ignorance, Opposition parties do in fact exist on this little red dot. Some, well one of them, even holds eight seats in Parliament but despite garnering 40 per cent of the vote in the 2011 general election — their best historical performance — these parties barely seem to be part of the public consciousness today.
And while some have blamed the government’s media monolith for suppressing coverage of the Opposition, the truth is that despite having an excellent platform and momentum following the 2011 election these parties have failed, in the last three years, to make a dent into the consciousness of ordinary Singaporeans. None of their proposals have galvanised the public.
While the two main Opposition parties — the Workers Party (WP) and SDP — have released a limited number of policy recommendations and papers calling, amongst other things, for renationalising the MRT and reducing the number of foreigners in Singapore, this sort of knee-jerk populism hardly constitutes a vision for Singapore’s future.
Despite aiming at obvious grouses we still have no idea what Singapore under Opposition rule would look like? How would it differ from today’s Singapore on a policy, constitutional and institutional level?
This lack of an articulate vision combined with a lack of charisma — of faces and voices people can relate to — leaves Singaporeans at every level struggling to see the Opposition parties as serious contenders and leaves young people completely uninterested.
*This is personal opinion of the columnist.
