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by Ngiam shin-tung
Alex Yam was appointed Mayor of the Northwest Community Development Council (CDC) in July 2020. However, it appears that he still holds the position of Executive Director of the Popular Action Party (PAP) headquarters.
Since the job of the executive director of the PAP headquarters is historically a full-time paid position, this implies that the government is subsidizing the operating cost of the PAP by paying Mr. Yam’s salary while he continues to serve as the Party administrator.
At the time of his election to Parliament in 2011, Alex Yam was Head (Strategy & Planning / Youth Lab) at Young NTUC, but left that job to take up the position of Executive Director of PAP headquarters. The CEO role has been described as “full time” in the PAP newsletter, and Yam has not been reported to have any other jobs since leaving NTUC, so we can infer that the PAP HQ CEO was a full-time employee and that Yam was employed by the PAP between 2013 and 2020.
Does Yam continue to serve as CEO of PAP headquarters after his appointment as mayor? If so, how is it different from a political official who works for a private company while in political office? As of December 30, 2020, Yam still lists the “CEO” of PAP HQ as his occupation on his Facebook page. Admittedly, this could just be a sign that he didn’t update his web presence after being re-elected, so I wrote to him twice at his PA email address, but received no response.
When Yam was appointed Deputy Executive Director in 2012, the PAP issued a press release announcing his appointment and published an article on its Party body, Petir, when Yam succeeded Pearce Lau Ping Sum as Executive Director in 2013.
Since the PAP has not made any announcements regarding the replacement of Yam as Executive Director, we can infer that he continues to serve in that capacity. The significance of this is that I’m pretty sure the PAP would not continue to pay Yam his CEO salary, and the Government would not allow the PAP to pay him in addition to the $ 660,000 a year he receives as mayor. But this means that the taxpayer is subsidizing the PAP by paying the salary of its Executive Director.
Mayors who multitask
In the past five years, three mayors, Low Yen Ling, Teo Ser Luck and Maliki Osman, have had other political appointments as parliamentary secretaries or ministers of state at the same time as they served as mayors. Political appointment holders typically have multiple portfolios in Singapore, so this is not unusual.
Desmond Choo’s case is more interesting because he is the Deputy General Secretary of the National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) as well as the Mayor of the Northeast District. This would attract attention in many other democracies because of the risks of a conflict of interest when a political official also holds a position in a union at the same time.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the Ministerial Code states that ministers “must not take an active part in the conduct of union affairs, must resign from any position they may hold in a union and must not be paid by a union”. Despite the close relationship between the Labor Party and the unions, the separation of union and government appointments has been respected even when the Labor Party was in power.
In contrast, all NTUC general secretaries in the last 40 years have been government ministers, although current Secretary General Ng Chee Meng had to leave the cabinet after losing his seat in parliament. Despite the loss of Ng and the questions now being publicly raised about the relationship between the Government, the PAP and the NTUC, two ministers of state, Koh Poh Koon and Heng Chee How, remain at the NTUC as undersecretaries-general.
However, there is a big difference between a political official who works for the NTUC and one who works directly for the PAP. It can be argued that the work of Koh Poh Koon, Heng Chee How and Desmond Choo for NTUC is for the benefit of all Singapore workers, but Alex Yam’s work as Executive Director of PAP HQ can only be for the benefit of the Party.
To be clear, I am not making any claims about Alex Yam’s personal integrity. I am very sure that he only receives one salary, that of mayor. The problem is that by paying Yam, the government is subsidizing PAP by paying the cost of its CEO. In the same way that it would not be acceptable for the Government to send public officials to work for a private company without charging the company, it is not acceptable for the Government to be paying the salary of a political party administrator.
The PAP has never been shy about using state resources for political purposes: improving the state and even the People’s Association itself are just two examples that come to mind. However, in both examples, the government can argue that public funds are being used to benefit the community as a whole. But by paying Alex Yam’s salary even as he continues to serve as PAP administrator, the government is indirectly paying for the PAP’s running costs. That represents an unacceptable blurring of the dividing line between Party and State reminiscent of the dramatic governance failure that allowed PAP city councils to sell their IT system to a Party-owned shell company.
As I mentioned earlier, Alex Yam did not respond to my emails that raised these concerns directly with him. It is possible that my inferences are incorrect and that he is no longer in the Executive Director position, or that the Executive Director position is an unpaid position. If any of these assumptions are incorrect, my concerns are unfounded and there is nothing wrong with my continuing to serve as Executive Director, even while serving as Mayor.
PAP needs to find another Executive Director
However, if the PAP paid Yam as Executive Director between 2013 and 2020, then the PAP cannot retain him in that position now that he has been appointed mayor. Six months has been a long time for the Party to find another administrator and the sooner they hire and announce a new Executive Director, the better.
This post was first published on Mr. Ngiam’s blog and reproduced with permission.
