Sunday, 25 December 2011

Shanmugam AS USUAL TWISTS FACTS & WORDS TO defends SENG HAN THONG racist accusations



Minister Shanmugam TWISTS FACTS & WORDS to defend Seng Han Thong

 December 25th, 2011 |  Author: Editorial
Finally, a full cabinet Minister, Mr Shanmugam, has come out to comment on the Seng Han Thong’s episode at a press conference on Sat (24th) evening.
The Law and Foreign Affairs Minister Shanmugam said: “A significant part of what has been attributed to Mr Seng is false, to be quite blunt about it.”
Mr Shanmugam’s key point is that Mr Seng had actually wanted to rebut a statement made by an officer of SMRT.
Mr Shanmugam said: “Han Thong heard over the radio what an officer from MRT said, essentially suggesting that poor language skills of Chinese, Indian and Malay drivers who work with SMRT were part of the problem in the inadequacy of the response by SMRT. Seng Han Thong strongly disagreed with this comment.”
“So when he went on TV, he referred to this comment, and in essence made the point that the language skills of workers should not be blamed for the inadequacy of the response. And his point is that broken English can be effective in communicating of what needs to be communicated.”
“The real problem according to him, was that the workers, drivers specifically, had not been given adequate training to deal with these sorts of emergencies.”
“The mistake Mr Seng made was that he misquoted the SMRT officer and said that the officer had referred to Indian and Malay drivers when in fact the officer had referred to drivers of all three races.”
Mr Seng had earlier acknowledged that he had misheard the SMRT officer’s remarks over the radio while driving.
However, Mr Shanmugam also thought that Mr Seng could have gone further and explicitly disagreed with the view which he thought the SMRT officer had expressed – that the Indian and Malay drivers couldn’t converse well in English. This is also TR Emeritus’ stand which we have stated earlier in previous articles.
Meanwhile, Mr Seng posted a letter to the National Transportation Workers’ Union on his facebook in the same evening, attempting to clarify his earlier actions on BlogTV:
Excerpt:
In the recent Blog TV programme, I expressed my view that SMRT needs to improve on the public communications during an emergency. I recalled I heard on the radio a view that cited our workers’ difficulty in English is a reason for the communication problems at the MRT stations. I disagreed and said that even broken English should be acceptable.
Unfortunately, in trying to defend you, I made the mistake of only mentioning our “Malay” and “Indian” workers where the original quote in the radio interview I was commenting on had cited MRT staff of different races, “Malay, Chinese, or Indians or any other race”.
My wish to defend you was further taken out of context and misconstrued by The Online Citizen. Their misleading title “MP Seng Han Thong: SMRT’s unpreparedness also due to Malay and Indian staffs (sic) English language inefficiency” (Dec 21), made it look like I was blaming any unpreparedness during a emergency on your language inefficiency.
I understand that this episode has hurt the feelings of our workers, as well as other Singaporeans, and I apologize to you for this misquotation. I never had any intention to belittle or push the blame of the recent MRT breakdown to the workers of SMRT. Having been executive secretary for NTWU for many years, I am well aware that our workers are competent to communicate with the public in English. That is why when I heard on radio that our workers had difficulty with English, I disagreed. So in my Blog TV interview, I tried to make the point that our not so perfect English should not prevent us from communicating effectively with the public, especially in times of emergency.
Hence, putting the racial misquotes aside, from Mr Shanmugam’s statement and Mr Seng’s posting, we can see that Mr Seng’s motivation for speaking up in the matter was to “disagree” with SMRT’s statement that part of the problem in the inadequacy of SMRT’s response was the poor English language skill of train drivers. Hence, Mr Seng tried to make the point that broken English could also be used and the workers should not be blamed for the inadequacy of the response.
Now, let’s re-look at the CNA’s transcript of both what Mr Seng said in BlogTV and what the SMRT officer said at the SMRT press conference over the radio:
Seng Han Thong in BlogTV: I would say there are two aspects. First the staff are not trained for this emergency preparedness, they know how to prevent terrorist (attacks) but even this one, they are not prepared so they follow a very strict kind of SOP, so they have to be flexible, and especially to deal with different kind of emergency whether it is a terrorist attack or internal, system flaw. They are not ready. I noticed that the PR mentioned that some of the staff, because they’re Malay, they are Indian, they can’t converse in English good, well enough, so that also deters them, from but I think we accept broken English.”
SMRT Goh Chee Kong over the radio: “What we’re mindful of is that our people, our staff at the stations and in the trains may not be making sufficient announcements and also good enough announcements. And that’s because our staff of different races, it could be Malay, Chinese, or Indians or any other race, they sometimes find it difficult to speak in English. However we’ve encouraged them to make the announcements and not to worry about that. At the same time, from our ops control centre, we’re making more announcements and I put someone there from the communications department to make the announcements so it becomes more regular.”
It doesn’t appear that SMRT is blaming the train drivers for any of their poor English. In fact, SMRT has encouraged them to make the announcements and not to worry about speaking in good English. That means to say, SMRT is fine with their drivers speaking in broken English too in times of emergency.
That being the case, so what are Minister Shanmugam and Mr Seng talking about? It seems that Mr Seng was trying to repeat what the SMRT officer was saying but did a terrible job by misquoting the officer. Mr Seng then turned around and tried to “disagree” with SMRT over a non-existent event (i.e, SMRT blaming train drivers for their poor English in SMRT’s inadequacy of the response) with Minister Shanmugam backing him. This whole Seng Han Thong’s episode is fast becoming a comedy of errors.
Discerning readers should watch the video again and again to draw their own conclusion.
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