CHAN Ah Pek sat in his chair and took a sip of kopi. What a night. He knew it was going to be crowded, of course. But when he heard that his buddy Low was going to be at the rally, he thought, well maybe he might want to get a cup of kopi with him after, catch up. Well, he would just have to catch him another time.
It was good to see him on stage though, the old man thought as he closed his eyes, recalling the scene at the open field outside Blk 837 in Hougang Central. He seemed confident, as he usually did, but perhaps a little tired. Still, the crowd loved him. His speech was entirely in fluent Teochew – usually, he would also speak in Mandarin at these rallies but he ran out of time, he said. It was 10pm. Had to close shop. Well, that was fine. Ah Pek was getting a little sleepy himself.
He took another sip of kopi and tried to recall what his buddy said. He was most passionate when he spoke on the AHPETC controversy, Ah Pek thought. The G had checked the town council’s accounts for 10 months, and couldn’t find anything, he said. If he was really corrupt, he would have long been taken away and locked up by the CPIB. The crowd cheered, drowning out Ah Pek’s own thoughts, which was how he really didn’t care that much about the whole affair. He was tired of reading it in the papers every day, frankly.
But it was a topic that came up several times. That Indian man, Mr Pritam Singh. He was talking about how town councils were being used as political tools against the Opposition, and perhaps, should they be returned to the Housing Board and be run by them instead? Also Mr Png Eng Huat, who talked about how the G was “highly mischievous” for suggesting that the party had caused the multi-constituency town council to fall into a deficit since both Aljunied and Punggol East were in surplus before they were taken over by the Opposition. He had a few choice words for the PAP, but it was this line that stood out for Ah Pek, and for the crowd – that the PAP was “not a party of the future, but a ghost of the past”.
Then of course, there was that lady, Ms Sylvia Lim. She seemed very frustrated, Ah Pek thought. Apparently, the Ministry of National Development (MND) has been sending her letters asking her questions about AHPETC – even on the weekends. “I thought they work only a five-day week?” she had asked incredulously.
Her defence of AHPETC was passionate, that much Ah Pek could tell just from her opening line: “I am the chairman of AHPETC. And I’m proud of it.” And when she went on to bust what she called the four myths about the town council, she really sounded like she knew what she was talking about.
The details were too convoluted for Ah Pek to recall, but it wasn’t that different from what he had read over the past few days while having his morning kopi at the coffeeshop: That the Workers’ Party did not use AHPETC to reserve contracts for friends, that it did not “overpay” its managing agent, that they did not “freely sign cheques to themselves” – and lastly, that the town council was doing just fine. The beginning was tough, she acknowledged, but “we have turned things around”, she said.
Ah Pek tried to remember what the other candidates had said. He took another sip of his kopi.
He liked the sociology professor, Dr Daniel Goh. He had said that “life was too short to be kiasu, kiasi, and kiagui”. Fear of losing, dying, and ghosts. Again with the ghosts! Was it because it’s the 7th month? Ah Pek wondered. So much fear, all because of the PAP’s policies that made education stressful for children, caused prices to go up, and people afraid to lose their jobs. Especially those who already were struggling daily to make ends meet. Now this Ah Pek was interested in – and he was glad that these subjects were touched on by the other people on the stage, even as he wondered sometimes if it was fair to blame everything on the PAP. The crowd certainly seemed to think so. Ah Pek tried to remember their names but failed. During the three-hour rally, including his buddy Low, there had been 14 people who spoke.
There were two men who talked about where they contested in the last election. One said he had kept his promise and returned; the other said there was nothing to return to – his constituency was now gone. There was a lawyer, a new candidate competing in a new SMC, who argued for more diversity in Parliament as a solution to the pitfalls of “groupthink” in a one-party dominated government.
That was also a point made by the man who spoke in lightly accented Mandarin – though, he spent too much time talking about roosters in the East and in the West, Ah Pek thought.
But what was all this diversity for? That was when things started to sound very similar to the Workers’ Party’s rallies that Ah Pek had gone to in 2011. To be a check against the G, almost all of them had said.
Ah Pek took another sip of his kopi, and was startled by a low growling sound coming from his kitchen. He got up and went to investigate, and caught a glimpse of a small furry creature racing across the linoleum floor into the back of the fridge.
Source: http://themiddleground.sg
