Roy Ngerng wrote a piece titled, ‘Time to agree we have been played out’, and has this as his leading paragraphs:
‘As our country grows richer, we become more selfish as people. But this doesn’t have to be the case. In other developed societies, as they grew richer, they learnt to care more and looked out for one another.
If I were to tell you the reason why we’ve become more selfish, would you believe me?’
No Roy, I don’t believe you. In fact I totally disagree with you that Sinkies are selfish. Not at all, and I can prove it to you. But I agree with all that you said in your subsequent paragraphs. So, let me quote some of the facts to prove how generous Sinkies are or made to be.
1. We share our little island with people from the 3rd World to the level of 50% or more of our population. It could be very much more if we fished out the number of these foreigners that are now called new citizens.
2. We spent hundreds of millions or billions over the years to offer scholarships and living allowances to thousands of 3rd World hungry students to study in our world best universities at the expense of our own children. Some parents have to sell their homes in order to get their children educated overseas so that we can be very generous and selfless to the foreign students.
3. We gave many good jobs, at least half a million jobs, to foreigners, to displace our highly educated and experience citizens. We let them have the good jobs while our PMETs drive them around as taxi drivers. How more selfless do you expect Sinkies to be?
4. We gave opportunities to train their doctors, their bankers, their IT specialists and many more, so that they can gain all the experience required to put into their CVs, and to be promoted to top management and CEOs in our country. We don’t mind depriving our own talents from such opportunities to be trained, to gain the experience so that they can take on more senior positions.
5. We gave employment agency licences, student recruitment licences, housing agent licences, insurance agent licences to the foreigners freely and happily. We do not mind if they eased out our own citizens in these industries.
6. While we have serious shortage of land and good homes for our citizens, we do not mind selling all the good homes to foreigners to live in this paradise we have built so that they can enjoy their wealth in peace and comfort.
7. When they rioted and burnt our police cars, we blamed it on our citizens for making them angry, for pushing them and yelling at them. We blamed it on our police officers for not being forceful enough to keep them under control. It is our fault.
8. We help them to integrate into our community not just be words but by spending millions on them to make them feel at home. We even help them to celebrate their festivals and turn our country to be more like theirs. How can we be called selfish?
9. We allowed foreigners to set up companies here and employed mainly foreigners with only a handful of Sinkies. And they enjoyed all the perks of being in this fine city but acting like parasites, sucking all the good things and shitting and peeing everywhere. We don’t mind. We are not selfish.
There are many other things we did selflessly to be generous to the foreigners to the disadvantage of our own citizens. Many of our citizens were even forbidden to buy public flats but the foreigners, turning new citizens, have a choice of flats served on a silver platter to them. And we will voluntarily serve two years of national service for a pittance, pledging to fight and die to protect the foreigners and their properties.
How can we be accused of being selfish? How can we be accused of being xenophobic?
Tiok boh? No matter how I look at it, I still think we are very generous, very selfless, to the point of idiocy. True or not?
PS. I think Sinkies are quietly saying to themselves, ‘Let’s move out and let the foreigners take over our paradise island.’ Let’s be generous and let them have our country.