S'pore High Commissoner to South Africa call Ministers greedy for money

[Sammyboy RSS Feed]

An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

And he wants more transparency too. I wonder how much longer he will be the High Commissioner to South Africa. I suspect a recall is in the works soon.

Maurice Baker was an English lecturer at the then-University of Singapore when in 1967, he received an unlikely call from then Foreign Affairs Minister S Rajaratnam.

Rajaratnam summoned him to a conference in New Delhi, which he missed by accident, but would nonetheless eventually lead to him being offered the job of Singapore’s first high commissioner to India.

From there, Baker went on to serve as ambassador to Malaysia, the Philippines and back to Malaysia again, while going between his stints at what is now referred to as NUS.

His experiences during those times, schooling in Raffles College with former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, are among those outlined by Baker, now 94, in a 278-page autobiography titled “The Accidental Diplomat” and written over a more-than-12-year period.

On the sidelines of the book’s launch on Tuesday evening, Baker’s son Bernard, who was inspired by his father’s work and now serves as High Commissioner to South Africa in Pretoria, told Yahoo Singapore that his father’s mind continues to be alert and active though he did not speak at all at the event owing to Parkinson’s disease.

The 57-year-old, the elder of the older diplomat’s two sons, said his father thinks Singapore’s current leadership is “excellent” though he has one misgiving.

“I think if he has a criticism, it is that (people before) took a massive pay cut to come in (to serve in government),” he said, citing S Dhanabalan and current law and foreign affairs minister K Shanmugam as examples of high-powered private sector executives who took pay cuts to enter public office. “But Dad feels that now, because of the high salaries, one tends to wonder if you’re in for the sake of the nation, or because of the salaries, you know.

Sure enough, the elder Baker related in his book his experience of having “to make a difficult decision” when he was first offered the job as High Commissioner to India. He was offered the same basic salary with the same variable allowance to what he was being paid in the university, in the climate of Singapore’s economy having “not taken off yet” and a “tight-fisted” Ministry of Finance.

“All together what was offered was about the same as the combined incomes of my wife and me,” he wrote, noting that his close friendships with cabinet ministers like then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Keng Swee convinced him not to let them down.

“But at that time money was not the important factor in making my decision. In contrast, in the 1980s and 1990s, attitudes had changed a great deal as civil servants and ministers had to be paid huge sums to prevent them from quitting public service for the prosperous private sector.”

That said, the younger Baker feels that his father “has tremendous respect for” the current batch of leaders, naming Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and Deputy Prime Ministers Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Teo Chee Hean as examples.

“He doesn’t have a problem at all with them, and with their vision for Singapore,” he said. “I think what he would like to see is, and what we’re seeing now, is greater transparency in government.”


Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com.