I pity Dr Ng

It’s quite rare to see a full minister so thoroughly and publicly rebuked as Dr Ng Eng Hen was last week. If you still have the ST from last Wednesday (May 12), he looked absolutely dejected – and on the front page too, what an embarrassment! He issued a public apology (for giving the false impression that Mother Tongue weightage at PSLE might be reduced) and sent a letter out to all Mother Tongue teachers for reassurance. I can’t think of any incident where a minister has been left quite so spectacularly to take the flak for his ministry’s screw-up.

My purpose here is not to thrash out the pros and cons of reducing the MTL weightage, to highlight the disproportionate amount of airtime that’s been devoted to Chinese Language advocates, or indeed to comment on the pedagogy – I’m not an expert on that, and many better (and worse) minds have covered the ground quite thoroughly enough. What I see here is a bureaucratic mess-up leaking into the public sphere and igniting general fury; in short, the grind and gristle of government, but in public, for a change. Too public, too messy and too embarrassing for the people in charge.

I’m not going to call for anyone’s scalp to take responsibility, neither do I see this as a victory or defeat for anyone – it was just an idea that got floated out before its time had come, and got spectacularly shot down. But I do think this should be taken as a sign of two things – the civil service is very perceptibly losing their connection with the feeling on the ground, and the same is starting to be true of politicians, even ministers. Although we have no idea what happened in MOE HQ in Buona Vista, it’s plausible to suggest that this incident happened because there aren’t enough MT advocates in the MOE bureaucracy (or that they aren’t being heard).

One other thing – I find it inexplicable that Dr Ng took three weeks to finally cool the sentiment, and that when it happened the PM had to get involved. It looks like a big slap in the face for Dr Ng (literally, if you take a look at the front-page photo last Wednesday). If the PM got involved, obviously it was considered to be serious enough to warrant his involvement. This begs the question: if it was that serious, why did Dr Ng take so long to call that press conference? If it was indeed a policy turnaround, why were people not consulted before his “wrong impression” interview last month? Focus groups, dialogues, all that jazz – that would have saved a lot of embarrassment all round.

A charitable interpretation (that I choose to believe) is that Dr Ng suffered a momentary lapse of judgement in his choice of words – perhaps he thought he wasn’t being clear enough and ended up reaching beyond his brief. Or perhaps it was a genuine signal for a policy shift, but the semi-public hush-hush consultations that should have occurred were overlooked (an unforgivable oversight). A less charitable, but plausible, interpretation is that the government (civil service and political leadership) is losing the political will to make decisions that matter. And if that’s the case, it had better address the problem before it loses the political mandate to make decisions that matter – still a long, unthinkable way more, but perhaps – worryingly for the people in power – not quite so unthinkable as three weeks ago.