Corruption in HK ICAC

From the WSJ: Gifts For Mainland Officials Anger Hong Kong

I remember at lunch a few years ago, a former colleague told me about how to be retired colonels in the SAF spend most of their time plotting their post military lives. They went beyond themselves to be on good terms with well appointed reservists.....Looks like the just retired head of the ICAC Timothy Tong had done the same. Everyone does this. Le's not be hypocritical about it. Timothy Tong is being investigated for picayune amounts. Over five years it works out to be less than $500 a month. It looks absurdly small when compared to the other worldly sums those corrupt mainland officials play with. I wouldn't be surprised the cookies, chocolates and mooncakes he gave them ended up in bins for being too cheap and unworthy.

Hong Kong is descending into absurd hypocrisy. They are burning one side of their face with a hot iron and then doing the same to the other side. I hope Singapore never become like them. We must have integrity but not whiter than white. Many people forget we got to where we are today because LKY was a brutal realist about human nature. Many of our laws reflect that realism and that is why pimping is illegal but prostitution isn't etc.,

The road to dirty start with the squeaky clean. To stay clean, just don't be dirty. But if you are like the late Hon Sui Sen that's a bonus. We just cannot demand that from everyone.

It is impossible to be squeaky clean so people end up successfully polishing the outside but build secure rooms for dirty acts. If we cut public officials some slack, most except for the errant few would not have  dirty rooms. Let's always be shrewd about such matters.

Good luck Hongkongers. You are turning into a cautionary tale for Singapore.


Update: 9:55pm

Unlike most societies which can be bribed, it is much harder to do the same with Singaporeans. We always ask how is a program going to be funded. Populist politicians have no edge here. My greatest worry for this place is that many people including myself believe in fairy tales and happy endings. This is good provided we are also brutally honest about what we need to do to achieve them. Often we are not and I am thankful for the accumulated research in psychology over the last two decades explaining why and how we do not know ourselves and our true intentions. We cannot trust ourselves without putting ourselves to tests first.

Hon Sui Sen and many of our founding leaders do not do what everyone does. They held themselves to a higher standard and were honest as honest Abe. The rest of us can try to emulate them but remember no US President after Lincoln succeeded in becoming anywhere like him equally shrewd and honest.

If we demand a standard that most leaders cannot achieve they will pretend and appear to reach that lofty place. Unfortunately their private shenanigans will eventually find their way into the public space and caused grave damage to moral authority, confidence and governance. This happening to China's leaders big time. So let's be real and not hypocritical. Let's pay our ministers and key civil servants very well but where we have failed is accountability. How I wished they were doing much better then we wouldn't be begrudging their pay. They are in jobs where if they do well no pay is high enough but if they perform badly, no pay is too low. Look at the damage Mah Bow Tan, Raymond Lim etc., had left us. It would have been far cheaper to pay someone good ten times more than the going rate of our ministers than suffer the costs we are saddled with now. The trouble with LKY was that he wrongly believed he got the best and that they were good enough.

Like Wall Street and fat cat CEOs, high pay isn't the problem; accountability is. Anyway if we have to raid boardrooms and executive suites for such self seeking talent, we are stupid bringing them into government to screw us.

Our people's weakness is the penchant for fairy tales. Our leaders' weakness is creeping moral corruption from a failure of accountability. And to be accountable you need to be sufficiently transparent, which they aren't by a long shot.

The irony of life is that at the end of the day, leaders who equal are to our founding generation would want to be sufficiently paid but not top pay because such men and women know it will diminish their moral authority and make their jobs many times more difficult.

Getting real is answering honestly the question if we can get such good men and women to serve. If we can't we must make the best of what is available. We must try them and be firm about removing unsuitable leaders quickly, which is where we are failing.