- Assessing the merits of our meritocracy
Ajith Nivard Cabraal and controversy have been very much in lockstep, and so it was no strange occurrence that the gentleman was embroiled in a pension fiasco in the few weeks just prior to his appointment for a second stint as the head of the Central Bank. If he was entitled to a pension, he was, and why he shouldn’t secure it was never explained by the critics. Having said that, the timing was a bit off, with household incomes lost in so many cases, due to Covid, and the optics therefore were rather horrid.
Chasing a pension entitlement is not a grievous offence however, and privately at least, most folk would not begrudge the former Governor’s desire to have his pension right restored. The point is that there has been so much misuse of state funds – not by Mr. Cabraal, but in general – that chasing up financial entitlements is also looked to as shady, if not suspicious.
Lee Kwan Yew, the much-idolised former Prime Minister of Singapore, said ministers and bureaucrats in public service should be paid handsome salaries, because “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. To this day, the Singaporean public servants get extremely good remuneration and nobody is complaining. What so-and-so in a government job makes is barely mentioned at all in the media, because the politicians and bureaucrats who get paid well have served their country admirably.
The result is also that the country’s administrative services are held in high esteem. They are not monkeys; they are mandarins. These bureaucrat scholars are looked up to because they are known for delivering the goods. In this country, however, public servants are seen as blood-suckers, especially if they are politicians. Most folk feel they are overpaid or grossly overpaid, at least if social media is to be considered as the authority to go by in these matters.
But compared to Singapore certainly, public servants here get paid peanuts. A person who wants a good salary never ends up in public service because private sector options are far more lucrative, which is certainly not the case in Singapore and many other countries.
Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article that should settle the matter for any doubters: “How much money does it take to keep a government minister in Singapore happy? The Government says a million dollars is not enough, and on Monday it announced a 60% increase in ministers’ salaries, to an average of SGD 1.9 million, or about $ 1.3 million, by next year. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s pay will jump to about $ 2 million – five times the $ 400,000 earned by President Bush.”
Singaporeans, according to the article, feel that the country would become like “many other nations” and get mired in corruption if politicians and public servants are not paid enormous salaries. The Singaporean Premier, when the last round of salary increases took place, issued a dire warning to anyone who may gripe about the contemplated pay hikes for Singaporean politicians, saying: “Your jobs will be at risk and your women would become maids in other countries,” if public service salaries are not increased. When the pays were raised eventually one more time, the public seemed to be more than happy to accommodate.
Contrast that to the situation here when the President pegged the salaries of public servants extremely low after he was elected in 2019. He placed a bar of some ridiculously low amounts for state sector chairpersons and members of director boards. It seemed that he thought this was virtuous because it would make an example of public servants and their spirit of “selfless sacrifice”.
He certainly paid peanuts and got a whole lot of monkeys, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. He has had to get rid of state sector top-dogs at alarmingly high-frequency intervals, and the Central Bank is just one recent example. Of course, when it comes to Prof. Lakshman, nobody in their right minds would think to describe him as a monkey – but it appears that he wasn’t a good fit for the Central Bank top job, and this is putting it mildly.
Perhaps present Gotabaya insisted on those peanut salaries and made a virtue of them because he knew from the outset the nature of whom he was appointing, even though he followed a much-ballyhooed merit principle, having got the jobs advertised. But the selections for the most part were anything but merit based. Those who had been sycophantic in some way and were perceived to have done some service (to him personally) or had written a book showering lavish praise on the President seemed to be among those selected. All these “you scratch my back” selections were couched, however, in the garb of meritocratic picking.
When appointees were chosen in this way, small wonder the President mandated peanut salaries – it’s not merely logical; it would be expected. This seems to be why Sri Lankans perpetually gripe about public servant salaries. They know that successive political leaders have for the most part appointed monkeys, stooges, so-called loyalists, or eager beavers who wrote sycophantic tomes about the Great Leader, and the lot.
Obviously, they couldn’t deliver then – and they can’t deliver now. The President seems to be now making some amends and replacing the simian type with people who are much better in the delivery department – but it may all be too little, and too late.
When a minority of Singaporeans protested against the last salary increase for politicians, the elder Lee Kwan Yew himself, who was alive then, and was minister-mentor, said that griping Singaporeans, if any, should undertake a reality check. “The cure to all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government,” he added. “You get that alternative, and you’ll never put Singapore together again.”
In this country, by and large, historically we haven’t had any alternative but incompetent government. By the way, the leadership, including this one, may pay peanuts to bureaucrats but will never hesitate to increase their own salaries. Other than the recent cuts taken voluntarily by some ministers due to Covid – something they were almost forced to do – as long as the people can remember in Sri Lanka, incompetent politicians have fattened themselves on the public purse.
So it’s very clear that our politicians, for as long as we remember, have appointed monkeys to key government positions then as now, and paid them peanuts. For one thing, people would not stand incompetence being rewarded with public funds. It’s too late to change this system, sadly, because as Lee Kwan Yew said: “You have a dose of incompetent government and you would never be able to put the country back together again.” He was talking about Singapore, but what he was pointing to is everyday reality in this country.
Even when competent people are appointed in the rare event in this country, they are immediately made subservient to politicians. Good people would not tolerate that even if they are paid Singapore-style salaries. The President here appointed incompetent people who couldn’t deliver, and asked them to deliver despite the even-lower-than-usual salaries he had mandated.
That’s hubris. It was thought that because it was him, and because he had obtained such a thundering mandate, his chosen people – mostly those who have written sycophantic books about him or provided him some sort of gainful “service” – would deliver.
However, sycophants may be able to lead cheer squads, but they can’t deliver. This Government is coming to the realisation the hard way. If there ever is a day they appoint truly competent non-partisan people to government jobs, they will have to raise the salaries of the appointees too, but nobody would be complaining if the designated folk deliver the goods.
It seems like the President didn’t want the newly appointed lot to deliver. He just wanted to feel good because they would fall all over him fawning – after all, they had been handpicked. It’s easy to handpick stooges and rank incompetents, but just see the result. Monkeys have had a field day, and how happy the average Singaporean must be, because they are not us Sri Lankans.
(The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of three national English language publications and a practicing Attorney-at-Law. He is an Editors’ Guild award-winning columnist, and contributing writer and columnist for the Nikkei Asian Review and South China Morning Post, while his editorials have been published in The Australian)