Singapore’s Highly Paid Officials Get Richer

Singapore’s Highly Paid Officials Get Richer

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By SETH MYDANS
Published: April 10, 2007

Correction Appended

SINGAPORE, April 9 — 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 percent increase in ministers’ salaries, to an average of $1.9 million Singapore dollars, 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.

In this nation where the bottom line truly is the bottom line, the argument goes, you have to pay to get them and you have to pay to keep them clean.

“If we don’t do that, in the long term the government system will slowly crumble and collapse,” Defense Minister Teo Chee Hean told reporters last month. “Corruption will set in, and we will become like many other countries, and face the problems that many other countries face,” The Straits Times, Singapore’s largest-circulation newspaper, quoted him as saying.

In announcing the pay increases on Monday, Mr. Teo, who also oversees the civil service, said: “We don’t want pay to be the reason for people to join us. But we also don’t want pay to be the reason for them not to join us, or to leave after joining us.”

Singapore’s pay system was created in 1994 by the nation’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. It pegged the salaries of government ministers and top civil servants to the money they might earn at the top of the private sector.

Under that formula, ministers are to be paid two-thirds of the median of the top eight earners in each of six professions: accounting, law, banking, engineering, multinational companies and local manufacturing.

There has been no public sign of discontent among the men and women who run Singapore, but last month the prime minister noted that they were earning just 55 percent of that benchmark. Hence the raise for the three dozen men and women who run Singapore.

Defending the system against an unusual public yelp of pain, Mr. Lee, whose title is minister mentor, painted a horrifying picture of a Singapore governed by ministers who earn no more than ministers elsewhere.

“Your apartment will be worth a fraction of what it is,” he said. “Your jobs will be in peril, your security will be at risk, and our women will become maids in other people’s countries.”

It is true that Singapore has one of the most efficient and corruption-free governments in the world. Transparency International, a private monitoring agency, recently listed it as the fifth most corruption-free nation of 163 surveyed.

It is Asia’s second-richest country after Japan, with a gross domestic product per capita of about $31,000. The first Prime Minister Lee said it could well afford to pay its leaders top dollar.

The average Singaporean earns roughly $3,000 a month, and the government has voiced concern over a widening gap between rich and poor. The ministers’ pay was approved three months before the sales tax is to be increased by 2 percent.

Talk of the pay raise drew criticism here that included letters to newspapers and an online petition that has more than 800 signatures.

“I am sure Enron and Worldcom paid more than top dollar for their top executives, and look where their companies are now — six feet under,” Mohamad Rosle Ahmad wrote to the editor of The Straits Times.

The elder Mr. Lee said naysayers needed a reality check. “I say you have no sense of proportion; you don’t know what life is about,” he said.

“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.”

The Straits Times quoted him as saying his current salary as minister mentor was about $1.8 million.

Some Singaporeans suggested that other motivations should also come into play for government jobs.

“What about other redeeming intangibles such as honor and sense of duty, dedication, passion and commitment, loyalty and service?” asked Hussin Mutalib, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore, in a Straits Times online forum.

Carolyn Lim, a prominent writer, suggested in an essay that Singapore needed a little more heart to go along with its hard head.

“To see a potential prime minister as no different from a potential top lawyer, and likely to be enticed by the same stupendous salary, would be to blur the lines between two very different domains,” she wrote.

The minister mentor brushed aside such concerns. “Those are admirable sentiments,” he said. “But we live in a real world.”