The Straits Times article kicked off by saying that Lee Hsien Loong's first decade as prime minister can be summed up in one word: Challenging. If someone else had written that piece, one could infer it was another way of saying the prime minister is politically challenged. There was quite a laundry list of what went wrong since Singapore's third round of musical chairs began on 12 August 2004 to support the thesis.
For starters, the bruising battles of the by-elections in Hougang (May 2012) and Punggol East (January 2013). Latter was triggered by a taste for mangoes, a very senior foreign affairs official would later be felled by pineapple tarts.
The sharpest recession since independence in 2008 when economic growth bottomed to 1.8 percent, and further shrunk another 0.6 percent in 2009. And that's not even accounting for the millions lost by Town Council mayors in flaky investment schemes.
Despite nation wide concerns about the detrimental social impact of gambling - and even disgruntled mutterings from cabinet members within - the go-ahead was given for Marina Bay Sands (May 2006) and Resorts World Sentosa (Dec 2006) casinos.
With the richer getting richer, Gini coefficient careened from 0.464 in 2004 to 0.489 in 2007. Here's why: "In fact , if I can get another 10 billionaires to move to Singapore and set up their base here, my Gini coefficient will get worse but I think Singaporeans will be better off".
Then the mother of mayhem with the population bloat of 4,166,700 (2004) to 5,399,200 (2013), giving rise to a myriad of shortages relating to transport, housing, healthcare, jobs and education. Topped off by the the Population White Paper target of 6.9m population by 2030.
The fireworks that rounded off the sorry decade were train breakdowns, riot at Little India, bus strikes and sex and corruption scandals involving "incorruptible" elites. Lest we forget, there's also this lawsuit against a health worker that opened up the Pandora's Box of the Central Provident Fund which turns out to have severely debilitating and far-reaching effects.
In retrospect, those with hindsight (which the guy obviously lacks) would have predicted the inevitable. Here's why: "Suppose you had 10, 15, 20 opposition members in Parliament. Instead of spending my time thinking what is the right policy for Singapore, I'm going to spend all my time thinking what's the right way to fix them, to buy supporters votes."
Tattler
*The writer blogs at http://singaporedesk.blogspot.com/