Shared with permission from Dr Lai Ah Eng received May 5th 2009. As of May 6th this was not published in the Straits Times.
Dear Editor,
I wish to respond to two points raised in the interview with the AWARE exco after it resigned at the AWARE EGM on 2nd May: people who turned up to vote for the Old Guard, and Singapore’s conservatism.
At the interview, one exco member referred to the “numbers game” in the voting and another implied that voting turned out to be in the Old Guards’ favour because AWARE’s founding and life members were roped for support. Ex-president Josie Lau insisted that Singapore is “basically conservative”.
It is true that voting at the EGM turned out to be a “numbers game”.
This numbers game was first started when the exco’s members and their supporters signed up en masse as new members and got themselves voted into power at the AWARE AGM. When the EGM was called, both sides appealed to supporters to sign up as members to vote. This could not have been otherwise in the real politics of voting.
However, that at least some 1,400 voted for the Old Guard requires some understanding of the range of people who turned out to be its supporters. For sure, some were founding, life and active members, but together they numbered probably no more than 200. (Remember, AWARE membership was at an all time low until the saga began). Lesbians and homosexuals would have formed an even smaller number. The vast majority was made up of inactive members and newcomers (young, middle-aged, old) who signed up last minute to witness the event, among whom must have been many fence-sitters who took a `wait and see’ and `give the exco a chance’ attitude prior to the meeting.
What is important to understand is why this vast majority was willing to turn up in the first place and stay on to cast their vote at a 7-hour long meeting held over a long holiday weekend possibly more enjoyable spent elsewhere.
I believe that the way in which the exco came into power already riled people’s sense of fair play and natural justice. But the EGM, beyond media reports, provided a real opportunity for people to see and to judge for themselves the quality and worthiness of its leadership.
What happened at the meeting certainly decided the voting among the majority and the fence-sitters. The Old Guards came prepared with homework done and were highly alert. The exco started with little to offer besides its members’ curriculum vitae and a list AWARE’s achievements over 24 years but which the crowd immediately recognized to be appropriated from the Old Guards. Worse, the exco and its feminist mentor showed a grave lack of emotional intelligence in facing a crowd it didn’t know or understand – their top down orders and responses such as `security, take him out!’, `sit down and shut up!’,`respect your elders!’ and the mischievous switching off of microphones alienated intelligent grown-ups. These and exposes during question time, such as items and amount of expenditure incurred by EXCO, opened a floodgate of emotion and made the queue of people waiting to have their say even longer. Even the Old Guard could not have anticipated this spontaneous outpouring of sentiment that turned the voting in its favour.
The humiliation of the exco at the EGM was of its own making. It should not cast the blame of its loss in the voting onto a numbers game it started. The EGM proved to be a lively (and noisy) marketplace of ideas, competences and smarts that the exco and its supporters simply did not have or could not match. The EGM also clearly showed that Singapore is complex, not conservative.
Dr Lai Ah Eng
Founding and Life Member of AWARE
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