Monday, May 23, 2011

How to pay ministers? Just ask them!

Denise Phua has a very good piece on the principles of how to pay ministers and top civil servants. As she relies heavily on Charles Handy's ideas, which is more a management philosopher than a doer, putting them in practice is going to be darn hard.

In the end, there will not be a perfect solution to the issue of pay. A society must decide but in reality the elite decide their own pay everywhere and often in quite complex and sophisticated ways. Some pay are deferred especially in large corporations and yet others open doors to highly remunerative opportunities in speaking opportunities and memoirs writing after leaving office. What they all have in common is that society has not so much decide how leaders are paid than they have learned to tolerate them. And that tolerance can be shocking when you consider the corrupt legacies of most countries with undemocratically elected leaders.

I think no ministers should be paid less than a highly able university professor. I safely bet that this is their lowest "market value" upon leaving office. In this way, we have established a base and now how do we scale up? There is an easy solution actually, and a surprisingly simple one. Ask each minister to name his pay! A wise potential minister would have grasped the concept of 'enough' as per Charles Handy definition alluded to by Denise Phua. If he or she doesn't even possess such wisdom, I don't think he ought to make ministerial rank and responsibility. Now if he ask for the sky, we know that is politically untenable and he is better off staying in his current job.

Sometimes, there will be some lucky and highly talented people who doesn't need to be paid at all because they already made or inherited enough. There will be special cases where the leader has a very severe family background and need the money to help with his situation at home. Whatever it is no minister should be paid less than a good tenured professor.

Finally, this must be one of my silliest blog entry. Of course somehow in the end the elite will pay themselves as much as the rest of society will bear. Gerard Ee's committee deliberations are only for rationalizations. There are uncountable ways to go about it. Silently, privately the real work is working out numbers that would not invite voters' anger. The skill is to get that number as high as possible since even a hundred times that number, the country can easily afford. What was politically correct about ministers' pay is now politically incorrect. Their pay will suffer a huge fall, but in essence not much might have changed in thinking and motivations. I dearly wished I am wrong. I would be most happy to be wrong. I am just trying to be real and yet hopeful about ideals.

1 comment:

  1. The review will recommend some cuts and then the PM and his cabinet can officially deny the claim that they gave themselves raises and that it was the committee which set the scale and not them..wayang

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