SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has called on Singaporeans to vote for a new People's Action Party (PAP) leadership team to enable the country to continue to thrive and prosper.
Mr Lee, who is also the Secretary-General of the party, made the call at the Young PAP's 25th anniversary celebrations on Sunday.
He said the need for renewal is not only critical for the party but also for Singapore.
Mr Lee said the current leadership team is experienced and cohesive and it is able to continue for another 10 years. But the 24 new PAP candidates for the upcoming General Election and the next batch will produce the next leadership team for Singapore.
Mr Lee said the PAP has made an exceptional effort to gather this slate and at least five of them have the potential to be ministers.
He is also confident they will provide the leadership for Singapore for at least two decades.
Mr Lee said Singapore continues to face challenges as a small nation and stressed that Singapore must always be an exceptional nation.
Mr Lee also reminded PAP members that their role is to serve Singaporeans.
So one key factor, he pointed out, is that they must be in touch with the sentiments and worries of the people. Only then, he said, will Singaporeans choose the PAP to govern their country.
Well we all know we do not need 87 MPs to run Singapore. The only reason why there are so many, is to dilute the power of the opposition. Now since 87 is stipulated, even PAP itself has problem looking for so many candidates.
We also know we do not need 21 ministers to run the country. Conservatively we can take away the posts: Senior Minister (2 of them), Minister Mentor, Minister for Prime Minister's Office (2 of them). This reduces the number of ministers to 16. In fact truly speaking, Singapore is so small, 1 or 2 really good ministers would be good enough to run the whole of Singapore. For example remember the buddy team Goh Keng Swee and Lee Kuan Yew?
Therefore the renewal of leadership is actually a much simpler problem than PAP has made it to become. If they just focus on sourcing only 20 really good candidates, it would be so easy to find and groom. It is also very easy to find 20 dedicated persons who do not need a million dollar salary as incentive. Even if 75% percent of the 20 candidates turned out badly, there would still be 5 really good ones. It would not be like now with so many low quantity candidates mixed in just to make up the numbers.