Mr. Shanmugam, don’t waste your time defending WKS, afterall he has more experience than you in security matters. As Law Minister, stick to what you know best, you should help LKY rebut the IBA or IBAHRI and convince them to change their perception of the Singapore judiciary. Great opportunity for you to prove yourself in this new job.

What Singapore needs is a reputable international organization to audit our security systems. Let them audit WKS as well to find out if he is competent and also not complacent.

Surely we do not want our security systems to be ranked 154th like the Straits Times. LOL

“With so many incidences, I wonder if complacency is the root cause or is it just the flavour-of-the-month excuse, just because our wise one said so.
It scares me to think that perhaps, another possible reason could be that our people are just stretched to their limits, and what we are seeing now are the symptoms of being too lean for our own good.
….So, they have no choice but to just try and cope as best as they can, until the ball is dropped! And then, they get blamed for being complacent. Damn if you do, damn if you don’t!
… For it would be extremely unfair, that the “blessed few” get their higher pays for coming out with ideas, which are just not humanly attainable by the rank-and-file without additional resources. And then these “blessed few” blames the same rank-and-file for being complacent!”

As a result of Sylvia Lim’s question in Parliament, we now know that indeed, insufficient resource may be a possible issue. Amongst other things, our guys have been putting in a lot of overtime.

When the majority was talking and capitalising on complacency being the root cause, some of us, on the other hand, were more “simplistic”. We took the “heartland” route and came out with an unsophisticated plausibility. Overworked! Over-stretched!

Why do I say “heartland”? Because being such a small country, it is not difficult to hear from someone, or someone’s someone, about how overworked and stretched they are at the Home Affairs Ministry. Indeed, just go to the passport department under SIR and you can see it for yourself!

But don’t those blokes inside know these for themselves? It is highly unlikely that simpletons like us can see it, but the highly talented with inside knowledge, can’t! So, have these guys lost their ability to connect with the ground, even though it is their own ground? Have they lost their ability to “Genba”, a Japanese management practice of going to the ground to see things for themselves? I honestly don’t think so, for they are, after all, highly talented!

I think the bigger issue may be like what Mr Ngiam Tong Dow mentioned previously, about the people beginning to believe in their own propaganda. If the culture is one that is top down, then even senior officers feeding information to decision makers, will be forced to “filter” information as it streams upwards. From officer to senior officer to manager to Asst Dir to Dir to Perm Sec…can you imagine how filtered the end input will be like? So even decision makers have to evaluate if the information they are getting, is indeed a true reflection of the ground. But are they doing it?

And the poor guys on the ground, who have been “politely” telling their immediate superiors “cannot tahan lah”, knows their plea will never be heard or understood…. as it has happened before mah ….. and every time a new initiative is implemented and the evaluation is ever glowing, it further adds to this false state of “it will resolve itself” mindset.

And the poor work horses are the ones who really know how previous issues are still unresolved and are just being placed on the back burner till a complaint arises, how the extra workload of handling new issues that arise from new initiatives, are being filtered because it cannot fail ….. and so on.

And with each glowing evaluation of each new initiative, the Dir, the Asst Dir, the manager, the senior officer, the officer….will be lulled into this false state that heh…it does work! When in actual fact… the time bomb they have all set off, has started ticking away….. And the poor workhorses are blamed for being complacent…..sigh….

Is the above scenario true? I really don’t know. But do a “Genba” and you may see that it is not too far stretched.

Mind you, the above is not just about the Home Affairs Ministry. The other Ministry which most of us commoners have much contact with, the Education Ministry, comes to mind. We hear so much about teachers being overworked, about evaluation systems that expects teachers to do more than just teach, etc, etc. This is definitely another time bomb ticking away. Do we need a highly stressed teacher to get a mental breakdown in class, to then go around slashing our children, before someone acts? Why must it wait for something “dramatic” to happen, before something REAL gets done about it? Who is the really complacent one then?

Sad…..really sad…..

Only Singaporeans feel suffocated by a completely security-sealed country with tendency for lapses.