The Community Club
Fitting into 21st Century
To achieve an old task of bonding Singaporeans, it needs to attract more Yuppies and Malays. By Seah Chiang Nee
May 26, 2003

IN one room, some adults are learning Thai; next door there is an animated talk on volcanoes by an expert. Walk on and you'll see other lessons on Chinese calligraphy, children's art and country Western dances.

Housewives and retirees practise cartoon drawing, creative stained-glass painting and salt dough while students attend workshops for Maths and creative science.

I was visiting a community centre - renamed "community club" - one of 106 in Singapore, an institution that Mr Lee Kuan Yew had used to defeat the communists.

Without it, history here could have turned out differently.

But today's creature is no longer a zinc roof, wooden hut with a hall and two rooms so common in the 1950s.

It was to these places that Singapore's squatter population would congregate in the evening to catch up on the latest gossip and watch black-and-white TV under the stars.

In those pre-TV days, it was the only focal point for the People's Action Party (PAP) to rally the people and swing them to its cause, away from the communists.

It's where the battle for hearts and minds was most intense.

To succeed, it had to lure them with attractive amenities, a TV set (few people could afford to buy one), Chinese chess, basketball and table-tennis and an inexhaustible supply of Chinese tea at the corner.

They ran English lessons, taught sewing to the women, disseminated information and advice to the poor. TV and radio were totally government-controlled.

Hundreds of thousands trooped there to get their daily TV diet that fed them what the government wanted them to see and hear.

The whole thing was a political structure for the PAP to spread its political message. The opposition Barisan Sosialis party regarded the community centre - next to the media - as propaganda machinery.

It forbade its followers from going there to watch. This meant that anyone who went to a CC had to be sympathetic to the ruling PAP.

Then came stability and affluence, which ended their political role, but raised a new problem: How to keep them relevant to the New Singapore.

Young Singaporeans, with rising expectations, were finding many of their activities boring, preferring the more prestigious private clubs, with their golf, swimming pool and elaborate gyms.

The old community centre can't serve a changed Singapore.

While Singaporeans got their news from this community meeting place, their children today get theirs not only from newspapers but from cable TV and the Internet - round the clock.

If SARS had broken out in the 50s, the community centre would have been a major place to disseminate information and fight superstition among a poorly educated mass.

Today, newspapers run pages of it every day. Last Wednesday, Singapore became the first country to have a SARS TV channel, the first in the world. It runs every day from noon to midnight.

Last month, the government began a website (www.sars.gov.sg) that dishes out the latest news and healthcare information on the disease, plus the latest hospital statistics.

To remain relevant and competitive, the People's Association, a statutory board, started an upgrading programme to rebuild all the 106 community clubs in its charge.

Much of it is aimed at attracting yuppies.

Several of them have already emerged looking like modern hotel resorts, complete with a theatrette, dance studios, libraries, modern restaurants and - Starbucks.

Behind all the new glamour, some old objectives remain. One is bonding the people; the other is education in the broad sense.

Many of the courses reflect the times. Senior citizens are, for example, being taught to move into cyberspace.

"In the past, the organisers decided on the courses. Today, the members decide," said an official. "We are prepared to organise anything the members want - abstract art, archery, kung fu."

A few clubs have set up their own mediation services, where residents can approach for help in resolving their conflicts.

Not everything is fine, though. One failure is the low participation of Malays in their activities despite special efforts to attract them.

The result has been minimal, a setback to ethnic social bonding. Most activities of the Malays remain in the mosques.

Other critics in fact say that the total number of people who use their facilities is too small to justify the kind of money spent. Some 60% are above 55 years old.

Some observers believe that, because of their nature, politics is not entirely gone.

It is counted as part of an octopus-like community structure that helps the ruling People's Action Party to exercise influence over the heartland.

The others are the Citizens' Consultative Committees (CCCs) and Residents Committees (RCs), which were set up to help Members of Parliament (81 out of 83 are PAP-held) run their constituencies.

The predominant control of this large community structure refined over the past 38 post-independence years has made it hard for the opposition to make inroads to capture votes.

During the 70s and 80s when the PAP was winning 100% of votes, some of its leaders were referring to it as not a political party but a national movement.

Such talk has stopped long ago. But the fact remains that the party's hold on society remains deep and extensive.

Today it controls the trade unions, all of which are affiliated to the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), led by a strong PAP minister without portfolio, Lim Boon Heng.

In addition, the strong government-linked companies, the civil service, armed forces and police are led by party leaders or staunch sympathisers of the ruling party.

It is not surprising since the party straddles the large middle ground, leaving little space for an opposition to exploit in an election.

All this means that should the opposition win a general election now, it will find it almost impossible to govern Singapore unless it fires and replaces thousands of leaders that run these operations.

If it doesn't get them out and put in its own people, it will find it impossible to implement its own policies.

With Singapore so small, it will find it hard to replace them all at once without declining standards. Some of them, including the community clubs, have taken years to build up.

(This article was first published in The Sunday Star on May 25, 2003)