Member-only story
Why Pritam won’t be held accountable at the ballot box
On 29 April 2022, Singapore’s Public Prosecutor referred the case of lying under oath to the police for further investigation. Parliament’s Committee of Privileges (CoP) — convened to investigate Raeesah Khan’s abuse of privilege for lying in Parliament — had found that Workers’ Party Secretary-General Pritam Singh and Vice-Chair Faisal Manap had been “untruthful in their evidence under oath” and had referred the case to the Public Persecutor.
To understand why I believe Pritam will not be held accountable for this subterfuge, we need to look at how Trump is successfully avoiding being held accountable for the January 6 Insurrection.
The hard truth is that the key premise of democracy — the electorate holding the government accountable through the ballot box — has failed. In a functioning democracy, the three estates of the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary work in concert to advance the will of the people. The legislative sets the policies, the executive implements those policies, and the judiciary acts as the check on the abuses or excesses of the executive. Supported by the fourth estate, the free press, the actions of the government are made known to the voters and if they disapprove of the…
