We have done great things, built great cities like Suzhou, Tianjin Eco city, F1, great Gardens By the Bay, and now we are going to build smart city or cities in India. We have contributed no small sum to the building of Nalanda University. How much have all these great projects cost us and what were the returns in absolute monetary terms? Let me touch on the intangibles first, like great publicity value, everyone now knows where is Singapore, endearing relationships, building goodwill, they will love us surely, if not at least for our money, they will help us now that we have helped them….etc etc. Ok, now that the intangibles are out of the way, let’s talk real numbers, the bottom line. How much we have spent and how much have we gotten back.? In other words, accountability.
We cannot be spending and spending public money on multi million dollar projects, or hundreds of millions of dollars per project without looking at returns. We are no Santa Claus or international philanthropists throwing our money everywhere for people to like us or be nice to us. It that why people welcome us?
Every project that costs hundreds of millions of dollars must be justified and accounted for. It is public money and no one should be thinking of using public funds casually for vanity. The hundreds of millions spent on foreign students, what is the return? Can I say zero except some goodwill, hoping that those scholars will be nice to us in the future? Oh, they helped to increase our talent pool and talents for the industries.
I believe every project of such high values is meticulously studied before approval. Do these mega projects need Parliament’s approval or need to be reported in Parliament? Have we not gone past the phase to tell the whole world we exist? Do we still need to keep telling the world that we are a world class city and please come and visit us in case the world did not know who we are and where we are?
What do you think? I think the whole wide world must by now know who we are and where we are and how good we are or how daft we are. Do we still need to spend hundreds of millions to advertise our existence or to affirm our relationships with other countries?
Chua Chin Leng AKA RedBean
*The writer blogs at http://mysingaporenews.blogspot.com/