Speech by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at 3rd National Convention of Singapore Muslim Professionals

“Towards a Community of Excellence,
Together with Other Communities”

Mr Azmoon Ahmad, Chairman of the Association of Muslim Professionals

Mr Nizam Ismail, Chairman, AMP Convention Organising Committee

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

1.     I am delighted to be here to join AMP for its third national convention.

AMP’s Contributions to Malay/Muslim Community

2.     AMP’s roots began in 1990 when 500 Malay professionals organized the first National Convention of Singapore Malay/Muslim Professionals. There was intense discussion and soul searching on the state of the Malay/Muslim community and what the successful members of the community should do about it. Then-Deputy Prime Minister Mr Goh Chok Tong spoke to the conference and challenged the participants to do something concrete to help the community instead of confining themselves merely to discussing the issues. There was an intense discussion, the group agreed and AMP was formed a year later. It had a focused mission, to improve the Malay/Muslim community’s socio-economic performance and the government supported AMP in this mission and has supported it since then. It designated the AMP as a self-help group and over the last 20 plus years it has provided in total more than $30 million funding to AMP for its projects.

3.     AMP has contributed much to the Malay/Muslim community. I was not here this morning but I saw the slides which Nizam used and you have seen the data too, how over the years it has helped more than a quarter-million people through its programmes. How every month it provides tuition and enrichment classes for 1,300 students through the Mercu Learning Point, how it assisted low-income families to start home-based business to supplement their incomes whether by selling kuih-muih or making baju kurung through the Micro Business Programme.

4.     AMP has worked well with other Malay/Muslim organisations (MMO) like Mendaki, Jamiyah or the Young Women Muslim Association (PPIS). Each of these organizations serves a niche and there is some friendly competition among them – it is inevitable – although overall they complement one another. And they come together in various forums, including in particular the CLF or the Community Leaders Forum which is a valuable platform for the MMOs to address Malay/Muslim issues together and holistically. The CLF is funded by Mendaki and it reflects Mendaki’s commitment to work with all groups to uplift the community. This bottom-up approach, gathering all the activists together, has been effective in identifying and dealing with community issues. AMP participates actively in the CLF especially in its Youth in Action Programme and I hope it will continue to work through the CLF in order to cooperate with other Malay/Muslim organizations rather than establishing new platforms that would duplicate what already exists, such as a different Community Forum.

Progress of the Malay/Muslim Community

5.     Thanks to the collective efforts of the government, MMOs and the individuals, the community has progressed together with the nation and together with your fellow Singaporeans across a wide range as you saw in the tables this morning, with higher household incomes, better education performance, larger proportion making it to tertiary education, dropout rates coming down steadily and dropout rates for primary schools down to zero and secondary school much better than before, fewer divorces and minor marriages and many other statistics.

6.     But there are still challenges. For example, drug abuse is still an issue. It has improved but it is still a problem. Last year almost half of the drug abusers who were arrested were Malay. Home ownership rates are very high but compared to where it used to be, the home ownership rates have dropped over the last ten years. Larger proportions are in bigger flats or private property because the successful Malays are making it and they have upgraded their lives and their homes. But there is also a larger proportion who are living in rental housing or some small numbers even homeless and that is a reflection of the declining home ownership rates and it suggests that some of these households are encountering financial difficulties or unable to service their mortgages. Either they were over-ambitious when they bought the house or after buying the house they ran into some other financial difficulties or the family ran into some other family problems, broke up, no longer willing to live together. So, before, one family used to fit into one house, now the same family has become two and needs to fit into two houses.

7.     These are problems which we cannot ignore but I think we should take a balanced view and overall I would say the Malay/Muslim community has done well. And it has done well and achieved what it has achieved in a meritocratic system through its own efforts, individually, collectively and also hand-in-hand with the government but without any affirmative action. There are not many other communities in the world which have made this progress and can say this.

8.     I read the AMP journal, the publication you put together for this convention. It is a good report, it is well-presented, it is thoroughly researched, the slides are clear, the trends are clearly explained and analyzed. And you have pointed out where the community has made the most progress – higher household incomes, educational attainments and where there are still problems and room for improvement such as the employability of older Malays and proportion who are going to university.

9.     One issue which is in the report and which I am sure you must have talked about this morning is the question of absolute versus relative performance. Should you measure yourself from where you are and just compare how you are doing or should you compare yourself as if it is a competition with the other communities and try and raise and catch up or get ahead. It is a long-standing concern. It is not something which has just come up. It is natural that as the Malay/Muslim community progresses, so will the other communities in Singapore. In some areas the gap is closing but not in others. The Malay/Muslim community started from a lower base, you have more room to go but at the same time you have not maxed out. So, you started with a small proportion making it through PSLE, now almost everybody makes it through PSLE. You started with not so many owning houses. Now, more than before when you started. You began in the job market with very few graduates and professionals. But today graduates and professionals who are Malay are not so few and are quite visible.

10.     So, I think there are some areas where you are closing, some areas where the gap is still there. I think we cannot ignore them but we should not just focus on the difference between the Malay community and the other communities because first of all it is a moving target. So, if you are measuring how well you are doing, I think you have to see how well you are able to do from where your starting point is because if the target moves it may not be because you did not make progress or you did not do work, but because the circumstances have changed and the other communities may have done better, may have done worse. Those are things which are not within the Malay/Muslim community’s control. So, it is better to concentrate on doing your best, the best possible you can do for yourself and aim for steady progress. Make it step-by-step, year-by-year and gradually from one year to the next do better bit by bit. But from one decade to another, you will do better dramatically. And I think if you look at the trend, if you look at the charts, you will see that. From one year to the next small improvements, sometimes down sometimes up. But if you look at it on a ten-year basis, I think we can in good conscience say over ten years each decade has been better than the previous one.

11.     So, overall the community can take credit for this good result and so can AMP because it focused on the social and economic issues and outcomes, because it identified these as the most important prerequisites for the community to succeed and I think this is the right approach and we should keep up the good work.

The Way Ahead

12.     What should you do going ahead? In a new position with a new environment, I think it is timely to have a rethink, to reconsider what your strategies and your approaches are. I would like to suggest two priorities for AMP. First, to continue to focus on improving the socio-economic performance of the community. The key to this is the fundamentals - education, strong families, financial skills. You get those right, everything else will follow - in the job market, in terms of your socio-economic attainment, in terms your housing, in terms of your leadership. That is what AMP was established for and that is why the government continues to support and to fund AMP.

13.     The second emphasis I would suggest is to help all segments of the community from the most successful to those who are most in need. Because we are looking at a pyramid in the Malay/Muslim community and each segment of the pyramid has got different challenges and different needs. And if you only focus at the top you will ignore the problems of those who are further down. If you only look at the people who are at the bottom, I think you will demoralize yourself and you will fail to notice the good progress which is being made by the people who are much more successful and who are becoming more. So, AMP has to take care of the whole pyramid, tailor your strategies to the different segments and lift the whole community up by pushing up each segment of the pyramid simultaneously. Help those who are doing badly out of trouble. Those who are doing average, help them to become above average. Those who are doing above average, try and excel. And if you are already doing the best and at the top of the pyramid, then leap up even further. I think that is the correct way for us to continue to make progress.

14.     I am happy to see that these are the priorities and these priorities are in fact in AMP’s report. For example you have a lot of discussion on fostering progressive and cohesive families which are strong, which are the basis and a basic building block for our stable and progressive society. If families are dysfunctional, it will lead to many, many problems. You have delinquency, you have under-achievement, you have housing woes. And the problem may not be housing, the problem may not even be the finances. The problem is the family failed to work and because the family is unhappy everything else went wrong. So, it is important to strengthen our families to enable our youths to achieve their potential and to maintain social harmony and progress. So too is your emphasis on creating a community of inspired learners. I think it is right to raise the aspirations of parents, to encourage students to work harder. To motivate the students and design teaching materials, pedagogy which fits the culture and the experience of the students. I see you have a slogan, Graduates in Every Family. I read carefully what it meant and I see you mean that we want every family to have a graduate and by a graduate we mean it in a broad sense - graduates from ITE, graduates from poly, graduates from university. And I agree with these proposals. I think it is right because this is what we are trying to do nationally too, to provide many paths of success for our students, to adapt our system to the abilities of each student and to enable each student to do the best that he can for himself and some will go one way, some will go the other. But each one should do the best they can.

15.     So this is a good example of working at all levels of the pyramid - from the less successful to the most successful and even for the successful ones to have many different pathways to success. Not just in academics but arts, sports, science, mathematics, business, many different approaches because in fact people are different and you have to fit the system to them rather than force fit them into one education system. So that is how we are doing it nationally and I hope the Malay/Muslim community will continue to ride on our national efforts.

16.     The third item which I was happy to see in your report was talking about strengthening the community’s financial architecture and in particular making families more financially resilient. Implicitly this is something which we have been working on all along but it is useful to identify it as a separate strategy because families which run into problems often do so as a result of financial difficulties. And if you can counsel or educate the families on how to manage their income and spending, how to live within their means, how if possible to put aside a little bit for a rainy day, how to avoid what sounds good but is really not a good idea and stay away from people who tell you about cheap loans that comes by SMS, then it will avoid many downstream problems.

17.     The government and the MMOs, including AMP, share these goals and initiatives. We have many government and community programmes which are targeted at these areas. I encourage AMP to work with the government and to partner other MMOs so that you can preserve the continuity of the efforts and you can minimize duplication and you can get the maximum value from the work which you put in. The government will continue to support the MMOs in these areas and back them up with national programmes. Funds are not the main constraint. We are providing funding to support the efforts and if necessary we can find more money. The main constraints are the activists, the volunteers, counselors, social workers, teachers, mentors, people who will not only talk about the problems but go out and do the back-breaking work, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, working with the families, working with the individuals, counseling, tutoring, guiding, encouraging sometimes putting them right, sometimes if you know them well enough gently reprimanding and say please do not do that, do it this way, it is better. There is a severe shortage of Malay/Muslim activists to do this work. It does not mean that all the professionals working on this need to be Malays. But it is easier if we have a good number of Malay/Muslims working on this because then when you are resolving social problems or engaging clients, you are on the same wave length, you speak the same language. I do not mean Bahasa Melayu but I mean you have the same reference, you can understand one another without any misunderstanding. There is no sensitivity that who are you to tell me these things and the religious context also will help to foster the right change in behaviour. So, I hope many more successful Malay/Muslims will step forward and serve whether in AMP or in the other MMOs. Not just to tackle problems but also to be role models for families who still can do with more success models and stories. This is the best way to build a caring and compassionate society.

18.     I notice there was one other new strategy in the AMP report and it was entitled “Reposition MMOs into organisations that engage a national, inter-ethnic issue-oriented agenda’’. I was not quite sure what exactly AMP had in mind. So, I asked and I understand from the explanation that one motivation is that AMP feels that issues which affect the Malay/Muslim community, whether it is dysfunctional families, whether it is education, whether it is drugs, cut across all communities in Singapore and are really national issues. AMP believes they should be addressed by the government as national issues and not just as community issues. On these issues AMP would like to contribute to the national discussion and not just be doing their own thing by themselves. They also explained that AMP had no intention of developing a platform for racial politics.

19.     My view is this, I think on these issues which affect the community, education, drugs, dysfunctional families, social economic uplifting, it makes sense for AMP to share their views more widely and to work with other groups and with the government. Because they have experience, they have expertise, they have something to contribute. By comparing experiences, pooling resources, coordinating strategies, I think we can all do a much better job of what we are all trying to do. So we have encouraged AMP to work with other self-help groups, Mendaki as well as the CDAC and SINDA and the EA (Eurasian Association) and to join in the national efforts and get it done together.

20.     However, I would urge AMP and the other MMOs to have a care about venturing into civil society issues which are not primarily to do with the Malay/Muslim community. Civil society groups cover a very wide range of concerns and interests, such as the environment, animal welfare or foreign worker issues. Now, there are many groups out there, each one with its own passion, pressing its own priorities, trying to influence society, trying to influence the government. It is the way civil society is meant to work. But AMP has a mission and a role. And if AMP gets diverted into these matters, then I think it will lose its focus on its primary tasks which is to tackle the social and economic issues in the Malay/Muslim community and to improve the well-being of the Malay/Muslim community.

21.     Furthermore, there is one other point which I think is worth remembering and reminding ourselves from time-to-time and that is that in Singapore we have tried very hard not to debate our national issues along ethnic lines. So, when we discuss matters that concern us all we do not do so as Chinese groups with one view, Malay groups with a different view, Indian groups with a third view and then you try and compromise between the different racial views which is how it is done in some other countries not very far away. But in Singapore we deal with issues and we discuss issues as multiracial groups, each with a different issue perspective. And this happens also in politics where the successful political parties you will know are the ones which are multiracial in their composition and appeal. So, Workers Party is a multiracial party and they had some success in the last general election. PKMS is an ethnic-based party and they made no impact whatsoever. The parties are organized multiracially, they present views which take a multiracial perspective and tend to the moderate middle ground and I think that is good for Singapore. It is good for the minorities too because then the minorities have a voice and then we can all gravitate towards a common understanding, shared identity and we can all live harmoniously together.

Conclusion

22.     The Malay/Muslim community has integrated well with Singapore in general and with other communities. It has worked closely in order to enhance mutual trust and racial harmony. It has overcome many challenges together whether it is 911, whether it is JI (Jemaah Islamiyah), whether it is the uplifting of the community through sustained long-term effort. Therefore Malay/Muslims have progressed with other Singaporeans. I think this is a big picture which we must not neglect when we focus on individual issues, when we focus on problems or indeed when we focus on specific exciting success stories. Look at the overall picture of Singapore - integrated, harmonious, progressing to the best of our ability and in reality to a very considerable extent together. This is what we have been able to do and AMP has made important contributions to these efforts and to the community. So, I hope you will maintain your focus and keep up your good work. The government looks forward to continue cooperating with AMP and with the other MMOs to uplift the Malay/Muslim community and we will continue to do this and the more successful they are, the more gratified we will be. So, I look forward to hearing your views and your ideas and to a having a fruitful exchange with you. Thank you very much.