‘TIS ABOUT BEING A CIVIL SERVANT – The RSOG Inaugural Chief Secretary Forum

Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh and a very good afternoon

Excellency Peter Ong,
Head of Civil Service Singapore

YBhg. Tan Sri Abu Bakar bin Haji Abdullah
Director-General of Public Service, Malaysia

Associate Professor Dr.Hamidin Abdul Hamid
Chief Executive, Razak School of Government

Excellency Ambassadors and High Commissioners

Colleagues from the Public Service of Malaysia

Ladies and Gentlemen,

On his last day in Office, Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States of America was asked, “Do you think the press has been fair to you?”, and Eisenhower said, “I don’t think anything a reporter can do will hurt me”. This was a man who committed great numbers of troops to battle and who himself opened the landscape of media in America during his tenure.

2. So Peter, this anecdote is to alert you of media presence here today. They are here in numbers to compare the qualities of our respective public sectors. I guess what we ought to do is live the traditions of Sir Humphrey Appleby from Yes, Prime Minister. When Jim Hacker, the Prime Minister asked the Cabinet Secretary, “You mean there’s really no way that we can’t not tell them?” Sir Humphrey Appleby would reply – “Open government, Prime Minister. Freedom of information. We should always tell the press freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way”.

3. On that note, it is my honour Peter, to welcome you to the Inaugural Chief Secretary Forum organised by Razak School of Government. I was wondering how can I fairly introduce someone I have known for so long, who I have had the opportunity to work alongside in various capacities and platforms. A good place to start would be that our journeys have brought us both to a similar end – to carry the burden and responsibility of heading the public sector of our respective countries.

4. Every day I am reminded by the people I serve, the stakeholders I report to and the fourth estate – the media – who seek to simply know that my delivery cannot be, as is said in Latin – stant nominis umbrae –stood in the shadow of a name. It needs to honour the name it carries.

5. As public officials we need to be constantly reminded that we must be driven by conviction of duty. Guided by the calling of obligation. But many continue to seek what exactly drives a calling? Is it inborn, do you acquire this at some point in life, or is it simply a need to self inflict pain? If we are to be guided by the cynicism of Sir Humprey he retorted, “When anybody says, “It’s not the money, it’s the principle, they mean ‘it’s the money”.

6. In one of your recent interviews you said what keeps you going is meaning in your work. Peter, as you served through the various portfolios in the Ministry of Communications and Information, to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Finance, I am quite certain, like many public officials, you may have considered pursuing a more lucrative career in the private sector.

7. But what keeps most of us back, and what has most of us in the public sector wake up in the morning for, is a conviction that we can do better for our children through the burden of decisions we make each day. I say burden because we often know not the far reaching impact and implications of a decision made in the silos of our walls. Yet I am convinced that if these decisions and actions are taken and made with the ultimate good of the people we serve as the compass, we can’t go wrong even as we may not immediately see the results in the time we served.

8. The rise of the Singapore public sector delivery has been simply quite remarkable. We can all learn from your experiences, not least the many challenges you may have faced and still do in maintaining relevance in a world that bites at every competitive advantage we create for ourselves.

9. You have shared your views a lot in public on the need for talent management in the public sector. In your Address to the Administrative Service in March 2011, you said and I quote, “We must lead and develop dynamic institutions which capture relevant organisational capabilities that will not only outlast the tenure of individual leaders, but also contribute to our resilience as a system to external shocks”

10. As Europe and America reflect their setbacks today, searching for a new emblem of leadership for these times, Asia is seen to be churning very capable leaders in the public and private sectors. We watched this in CNBC’s 10th Asia Business Leader’s Awards hosted by Singapore in September this year.

11. The opportunity for the public sector lies not only in where and how we identify these leaders and talents, but rather how we retain them in a sector that is often seen unwelcoming to anything non-public service. In the words of General Sir Walter Walker, who served as a commander during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s and as Director of Operations in Borneo between 1962 and 1965 who said and I quote, “Britain has invented a new missile. It’s called the civil servant. It doesn’t work and it can’t be fired.”

Ladies and Gentlemen

12. We are no longer living in a connected or interconnected world. We live in an interdependent world, today. What a trader does at his trading desk can wipe out economies in continents. A vegetable seller who sets himself on fire in a town most of us may not have heard of can change political landscapes in regions. The value system we each live by can affect futures in lands we may not even have heard of.

13. The audience present here today comprises members from the public and private sectors in Malaysia, academics and media. We selected a wide ranging audience because we live as communities locally and globally. Even as we may compete for relevance in our sovereignties, the well being of the collective has a great bearing on the prosperity of individual markets. And so it is for this reason that your insights into the journey of Singapore’s public sector are relevant to us all.

14. Ladies and Gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Excellency Peter Ong Boon Kwee, Head of Civil Service Singapore to deliver his lecture titled, “Building An Adaptive Public Service”.

Thank you.