To Kill A Wild Boar. A Failure In Governance

The events leading to the decision to cull the wild boars in Singapore reminds me of the storybook: To Kill A Mockingbird. A story of injustice where the court was not a place where a black man can have his innocence proven but was merely a venue to determine his sentence, his guilt already a forgone conclusion.

This is the exact situation the wild boar finds itself. The decision to cull had already been made, all the public discussion is but a sideshow. Trumped up charges on the flimsiest of 'evidence' had been made as justification. And sentence pronounced.

But the larger story is not about the wild boar. It is about how the process of governance is being carried out in Singapore. PM Lee was quoted as saying at the Singapore Symposium held in New Delhi: "But there are also families who say the wild boar killed my dog, another family says the wild boar knocked over my child, better do something about it. Finally, we have to do something about it."

The troubling thing is that our PM Lee appears to have accepted the 'evidence' at face value. Take the unfortunate incident of the pet dog that was killed. The first OBVIOUS question anyone, what more a PM, would have asked was what was the dog doing? Was it sleeping quietly minding its own business when the boar attacked it for no reason at all? Or (more likely), the dog was barking, chasing and possibly trying to bite the wild boar in question? Perhaps the wild boar was a mother defending its piglets from the dog. In that light, was the boar wrong in attacking the dog? I don't think so.

Why is this bad for Singapore? In the past, dynasties have fallen when Emperors chose to listen without question, glowing stories of their empires from their courtiers and eunuchs when the reality was that the country was falling into anarchy. Who is to blame? The conniving courtiers and eunuchs for lying or the Emperor himself for being too lazy to think and confirm the facts for himself?

PM Lee had shown that he has abdicated his responsibilities, at a public forum in an international setting no less. This is not just about a small matter of some wild boars. It is about how he governs the country. It would appear he is not above just taking the word of his ministers at face value without even doing the barest minimum of due diligence expected of someone holding the responsibilities of the office of PM.

It may be necessary to cull the wild boar, but it needs to be done for the right reasons. Doing the seemingly right thing but for the WRONG reasons is not the way to go about justifying it. And it is definitely not the way we would want our country to be governed.