PM Goh woos bright overseas Singaporeans

Our brightest are needed to renew the core talent to run the country and create wealth, PM Goh tells NTU students

SINGAPORE will fail to renew its core group of talent to run the country and help create wealth if its brightest did not return home upon graduation, warned the Prime Minister yesterday.

Speaking to a capacity crowd at the Nanyang Technological University, Mr Goh Chok Tong highlighted a trend of bright young Singaporeans, who studied abroad, continuing to live there to satisfy their personal fulfilment goals rather than the country's needs.

Bright people were needed, he said, to run key firms which create wealth and jobs for Singaporeans.

"This is surely more important to the nation, at this point of our development, than their being tucked away in some corner of a research laboratory or organisations abroad."

He added that while he could understand the excitement and sense of fulfilment in doing medicine or research, he feared that if a disproportionate number of the best brains went into basic research in esoteric areas of medicine, science and even IT, there will be fewer left for other key sectors.

Hence, there was a need to set up a career guidance system to steer able students to where the big jobs here were, he said, in areas where they could make a difference.

The phenomenon of the brightest staying away was a problem which would become more acute, he said, noting that as more able young people went abroad for undergraduate studies, they would be scouted to work for world-class organisations.

"This is a chicken-and-egg problem. If our best, who qualify to work for world-class institutions, are not prepared to come back, how can we make our institutions world-class?"

He said there was a need to get the message across that the ablest here had been able to get where they were only because the country had made good progress, with a core group in the public, private and people sectors that kept Singapore going.

"This core group has to be self-renewed. Without this core group to look after the house, there will be no economic growth and new wealth. If more of our best stay away from Singapore, this virtuous cycle will be broken," he said.

Mr Goh's warning comes hot on the heels of a debate on whether scholarships ought to be scrapped in favour of study loans.

Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan had suggested the move in response to more scholars breaking their bonds and leaving the sponsoring organisations with positions which had been kept vacant for them.

In his speech, Mr Goh also returned to a topic he broached in Parliament last week -- the creation of a Singapore tribe. He said he had used the word in a metaphorical sense to refer to a common Singapore family, with its distinct core values and social traits and sharing a common destiny, not a "test-tube approach" of making all share the same DNA.

He said that such a tribe could emerge if Singaporeans worked on emphasising their common practices and beliefs, such as respect for elders, family as society's basic unit, putting society before self, and consensus rather than conflict.

He also devoted a major part of his 40-minute address, titled "Whither Singapore", on the economy.

He said the country needed to focus on the big picture, that to succeed as a global knowledge economy, it needed to have more talents than others.

He urged the 1000 students, who later asked him questions from creativity to foreign talent in a lively exchange, to take risks and become technopreneurs.

The salary scale here, he noted, also had to shift to motivate the risk-takers better than the careerists and pay ratios between the top and bottom should be shortened from the present 2 or 3 to 1.6 to 1.8. Turning to foreign talent, he made it clear that the policy was not an indictment of Singaporeans.

But he noted that competition for talent was keen and Singapore had to do its best to nurture and retain its own talents while attracting those from abroad. "We could be just another 'ordinary' city in Asia, with a vision limited by our geography and population size, or we could become an international city of excellence which breaks out of our physical and demographic limitations. The choice is obvious."