Leaders should represent our hopes. Leaders should be role models. Leaders must be better people in some vital respects. If the leaders are going to be in a position to help others get what they want in life, they must have honour, integrity and high morals in their own lives.
It is no good if a leader claims that he/she has given so much to so many yet (reputation and money aside) is less successful in his private life with his family and those closest to him.
Having risen so high in the political spectrum, a former health minister’s fall must have been painful. I am sorry for that and for his family. However, that does not obscure the fact that justice must be done and seen to be done.
It is no good if he lived as if admitting a wrong or fault itself brought forgiveness and that his admission obviated the need to express remorse, make amends and seek genuine reconciliation.
Life is about making choices. Some choices we make are rational. Some rash. But we must be mindful of God’s law of harvest: We reap what we sow.
Some things in life are absolutely right and some things are absolutely wrong. There is a black and white to life. Our society today is buying into the idea that there are no universal truths - that what is right for me may not be right for you.
That may be true when it comes to picking the colour of the shirt we’re going to wear or the colour of the tie we’re going to buy, but its not true when it comes to honesty, integrity and morality.
There are some things like faithfulness to our spouses - this is a black and white issue. Tom Peters reminded us that here is no such thing as a ‘minor lapse of integrity’. Emerson once said that ‘ability without honour has no value’.
All this give us reason to pause and think, especially before MCA nominates candidates to be ministers in the cabinet.
May I suggest we consider ‘What lies behind them and lies before them are tiny matters compared to what lies within them’?
MCA must seek out those with honesty, integrity and high morals to set a new direction for the party, for our Chinese community and for our nation. Let them champion the voice and aspiration of the Chinese community and to have a strong and influential voice in the corridors of power.
I firmly believe MCA has a vast pool of capable and morally upright leaders from which its president can choose from.
