Stop Expecting the PAP to Change, You’re Only Wasting Your Time

More than a month since the launch of the book ‘PAP V PAP’ by Cherian George and Donald Low – packed with ideas and suggestions for the PAP on where and what it can change to keep in tune with a changing world, which is in line with what PM Lee said the PAP must do – there is complete silence from the PAP.

Not a squeak from any PAP minister or MP or even supporter about the book.

Not a whisper. Not a whimper. Nothing.

On the contrary, a planned public forum on the book itself, with the 2 authors as panel speakers, was mysteriously changed a week before it was to take place. The 2 authors were suddenly disinvited and replaced, with no explanation whatsoever.

So, who still believes in giving feedback to the PAP?

My advice is: don’t waste your time. Give your feedback to the opposition parties instead. It is time for us to nurture a serious alternative to the PAP. This is for our own sake and for our future generation. The worst and most dangerous thing we can do is to keep hoping for the PAP to change, or to think that it can or will or wants to change. In fact, we had been doing this since 2011, after it lost a GRC for the first time. The phrase “soul searching” was bandied about for a time. But here we are, 10 years later, and we are still talking about the PAP changing.

The PAP is too atrophied, paralysed by its ingrained elitism, and its leaders drowned in their own poisonous hubris to truly effect change, as Ngiam Tong Dow once observed. How else do you explain its complete silence on a very well meaning book by two authors who are able to put aside their disagreements with the party and take time and effort to write an entire book chock-full of ideas and suggestions specially for the PAP? No 4G minister even dares to whisper the name of the authors, or the title of the book. That’s how sad the 4G is.

What has happened since the elction in July which tells you the PAP will change? Co-opting Victor Lye into its CEC? LOL

Wake up.

It will be the same old PAP come 2025, perhaps a worse version.

Wake up.

If you were truly sincere about “listening with respect and humility” (as Heng Swee Keat promised 3 years ago that 4G would do), wouldn’t you be inviting the 2 authors to meet and have at least a chat about their ideas? But we keep expecting too much of the PAP.

So stop it.

Andrew Loh