Limpeh endorsed by URA - WTF?

I like seeing people read and enjoy my blog - but imagine my shock when I found my blog reproduced on URA's website here. The URA (Urban Renewal Authority) reproduced my blog post in full, uncensored, including the bits which read, "Fucking hell. Fuck you PAP and please just shove it." and "Fuck the PAP. So glad these fuckers lost in Punggol East." Granted I was quoting comments I have read on Facebook, but still I thought the words 'fuck you PAP' would never appear on a URA website, but there you go. Okay, at least they didn't try to censor the word fuck or the fact that clearly, I have made my feelings very clear about how I feel about the PAP.

To be fair, whilst the URA is a part of the government as a statutory board, they are not strictly speaking part of the PAP. The people who work at the URA may very well support the opposition. I had a look at the article preceeding mine on the URA website and it was one by Bertha Harian (ooh I am in good company - that was a good article) and the rest of the articles in that series were rather anti-PAP, I was pretty shocked but there you go. The URA believe it or not, is actually listening to people out there on what they had to say about the government's population white paper, including those of us who are clearly, blatantly, vehemently anti-PAP. And modesty aside, I wrote a pretty good piece looking at life in cities more crowded than Singapore - what can I say, my A level geography teacher Mr Truman would be proud.

But there you go - not all civil servants are cronies of the PAP, even if they are working for a governmental organisation. Who knows, had I chosen to return to Singapore upon my graduation, I may have ended up working at somewhere like URA given that I was armed with a degree in the social sciences from one of the top universities in the world.  So yes, perhaps this is a cause for us to have a bit more faith in the statutory boards of Singapore - the list is long but some of the more familiar names include the CAAS, HDB, IRAS, LTA, NParks, STB and PUB.

Is there a link between town planning and politics? There shouldn't be. 

So if the professionals working at the statutory boards are independent (are opposed to PAP cronies who will do their every bidding) and are they then able to come up with policies and projects autonomously? Sadly no, this is Singapore, what did you expect? Wouldn't it be ideal if the government had a more hands off approach to the statutory boards and trust these experts to just get on with what they are best at? MDA - the Media Development Authority in one such statutory board who clearly serving the PAP's every whim with this Broadcast Act fiasco. In my last post, I have talked about just how utterly ridiculous and delusional Yaacob Ibrahim is when he thinks he can dictate to foreign media sources like the BBC and CNN what they can and cannot say about Singapore.

OK, so some of the politicians in the PAP are clueless when it comes to how modern media operates. It is clear that Yaacob Ibrahim has no clue what the hell he is talking about and that he is an old man who barely knows how to use the internet. If I may quote my dear reader Yoda who wrote, "I dream of the day I become a senior executive of a huge, international media outlet like the BBC, so that when I get a letter from the MDA or Yacoob, I can reply:

"Dear Sir/Mdm/Whom it may concern,
I think you suck, and there isn't really much you can do about it. Post it on stomp perhaps? I don't care. #bringiton #hashtaggingthepap #betyoudidntevenknowwhathashtaggingwas
- Senior Emeritus Jedi Yoda, Director without portfolio"

This begs the question - surely there are brighter, more intelligent people at the MDA who do must be good with social media and understand how news is reported in this day and age. Have a look at the senior management at MDA here - surely some if not all of these people must know what they are doing to have gotten where they are today. Didn't any of them sit down with Yaacob to try to give him some friendly advice about what he can realistically achieve when it comes to trying to influence or censor international news networks like the BBC? Or is it simply a case of The Emperor's New Clothes, where no one has the balls to tell the Emperor that he is walking down the street totally naked?

I believe it is the latter - I have enough faith in the statutory boards of Singapore to actually find decent staff given that their pockets are deep enough to attract the brightest brains in Singapore to work there. Indeed, I remember the many scholarships offered to bright A level students - I did consider applying to some of these scholarships myself back in the day given how attractive their terms were. However, it is shockingly counterproductive to get all the best brains in Singapore through these scholarship schemes, only to let them be overruled by a PAP minister who doesn't have a vaguest clue about media. Even if the senior management at the MDA are pro-PAP and support tighter censorship, they could have at least proof read some of Yaacob's notes (before he made the gaffe about the NZ Law Commission Report) before he made a fool of himself in front of the journalists. Oh the irony.

So there you go. It is a pretty sad reflection on the state of the government of Singapore. You do have people in the statutory boards who are clearly intelligent and know what they are doing, clearly someone at the URA read my piece, got past the fact that I wrote the words 'Fuck the PAP' in the piece and still thought, this is actually a really well written piece of anthropological research and put it on their website. (Well it would've been nice if they had asked my permission or at least informed me, but I digress.) Yet this whole MDA fiasco has shown that the government are clearly not uses the human resources (ie. intelligent people) who are clearly employed by them in their various departments.

Perhaps the answer is revealed in this article from TRS: it shows a list of SAF Generals who are now ruling Singapore - so what is the point of training up scholars to work in your statutory boards when all you're going to do is to get some military general with no relevant experience to run the show at the end of the day? It makes no sense whatsoever, but that's the Singaporean system for you. It is counterproductive at best, if not downright dumb.

I don't even want to begin to try to explain how we ended up with such a warped system in Singapore. Short of getting rid of the PAP altogether and starting with a clean slate, I don't have a better solution. Do you? What do you think? Let me know what you think - please do leave a comment below, thanks for reading.