Today, we will celebrate our 53th National Day Parade at the floating platform. I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely wish all my fellow Singaporeans a very Happy National Day.
Over the last two days, I drove around Singapore to observe the displaying of our national flags by HDB residents from their units. The results were so pathetic when compared with past years’.
Life in Singapore under the present PAP government is tough for so many of our citizens - despite the huge and impressive façade and display that is being put up at the floating platform, an unmistakable reluctance to hang the national flag is the real litmus test, and lest PAP government forgets, our citizens’ well-being is what really matters.
It is obviously a circumstance of style over substance. I don’t need any PAP ministers or PAP scholars or PAP generals to patronize me with fictitious answers.
Looking back when we were ejected from Malaysia against our wish in 1965, our future was so very bleak and it seemed the sky fell on us. The odds were stacked so high against us that nobody even gave us any chance of survival. But we did not beat a retreat.
Back then, our hugely uneducated and poor citizens pulled together with our old guard ministers and soldiered on. The rest is history. Today, we are enjoying the breeze under the big Singapore tree that they had together planted.
As a citizen, I do not know Lee Hsien Loong personally and I have nothing personal against him, but I am very disappointed with a number of decisions and performance of his government.
Although he belongs to the same political party that his father and others jointly founded, he and his cabinet colleagues today do not possess the same level of calibre, political instincts, empathy and acumen compared to the pioneer generation of PAP leaders.
These were the people whose leadership lifted a generation of people whom my grandparents belonged to. They lifted us from third world to first and made us a proud and confident people, ready to face and take on the world. Unfortunately the same level of praise cannot be heaped upon the current government in power.
I hope that the PAP government is honest and humble enough to admit they haven't quite done right by the ordinary Singaporean, at the same time be willing to do a postmortem through introspection and earnest reflection in a bid to genuinely appreciate the growing discontent on the ground. No time is more appropriate than now to address the acute lack of accountability , deteriorating governing standards among numerous systemic failures witnessed tripping up the Lee Hsien Loong administration.
Happy National Day to all.
Simon Lim
