By Prof. Damasus Tuurosong
ANTE SRIPTUM (AS): I don’t intend taking you on a long, windy read. After all, Ghanaians’ appetite for reading is as dull as the country’s public service. With a tape in hand, I’ll measure this piece as a fashion designer cuts a lady’s skirt: short, but long enough to cover the most essential parts. For brevity is the soul of wit.
Fact: Discipline is a cornerstone of Singapore’s development. Their schools have a Discipline Master whose duty is to instil, in children, values that propel development.
Speculation: A subject taught in Singaporean basic schools is, “How to avoid the Ghana faux pas in development”.
And why would Ghana’s missteps towards development be the reference point for growing children in Singapore? The two countries are twins. Non-identical twins that were born the same year to the same mother, Queen Elizabeth II. After all, Singapore was part of the Federation of Malaya which was established in 1948 and gained independence from Britain on 31 August 1957, after Ghana had on 6th March of the same year been birthed at the Independence Square in Accra to much hope, pomp and pageantry. On 9th August 1965, five years after Ghana gained republican status, Singapore signed its divorce with Malaysia to herald true independence.
So in a sense, Ghana and Singapore are twins. Fraternal twins. Like the Biblical Jacob and Esau, sons of Isaac and Rebekah. Like Esau, Ghana sells her birthright, her vast resources, for a bowl of red pottage and remains deprived. But Singapore, with no natural resources, flourished. Orphaned at birth and pushed to the wall after its breakaway from Malaysia, Singapore was referred to as ‘A little red dot in a sea of green’. As a result, the country has a pervading sense of vulnerability which was inherited from its founders. Vulnerability is consciously built into the people’s psyche and national narrative through their educational system, national songs, official speeches etc.
With an estimated 5.9 million people and a land size of just 700 Km² as against Ghana’s 35.7 million population and approximately 239,500 Km², Singapore’s creed is, “never forget that your country is small and its future is fragile”. That is their survival instinct, their growth mindset. Like any endangered species, it had to fight for survival. And fight, it did. But beyond mere survival, its fortunes soured, outpacing Ghana which was born with a golden spoon in its mouth. In the case of Ghana, the gold proved the country’s undoing. With excavators, the spoon of gold was dug out of Ghana’s mouth leaving behind a blood bath, a country bleeding to its last breath.
Evidence of how the resource-deprived Singapore outsmarted the resource-rich Ghana is in IMF data. In 2025, the IMF credited Singapore with a GDP of $574.18 billion, more than five times Ghana’s which stood at $111.96 billion.
Many have attributed Singapore’s meteoric surge to prosperity to the efficiency of its public service which is ranked among the best in the world. In humility, Ghana must learn from Singapore how to fix its broken public service. And who best to bell the cat than the House of Representatives? As part of its oversight role, Parliament has to be abreast with global development trends to hold the Public Service accountable.
So between 20th and 22nd January 2026 when the Singaporean Government hosted public sector leaders from across the world to a Global Government Summit, Ghana’s Parliament, led by the Speaker, Rt. Hon. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, could not miss an opportunity to pluck a leaf from Singapore’s leafy tree of progress. A meeting between the Speakers of Ghana and Singapore reaffirmed the strong and longstanding relations between both countries, including cooperation in trade and investment, aviation, maritime affairs, and emerging areas such as artificial intelligence.
Such international engagements reflects
Rt. Hon. Alban Bagbin’s continued efforts to deepen international partnerships and position Ghana’s Parliament as a key player in global governance. After all, the progressive leader seeks best practices and adapts them to fit his people’s peculiar situation. The first President of Singapore, Yusof Ishak, realized this early in the day and sought best practices from varied ideological blocs and philosophical orientations.
Answers as to how an orphaned dwarf state emerged into a giant economy were not only found in the palatial, opulent, gilded and boudoir-like conference rooms of the summit. The answers were strewn on the squeaky clean streets and carefully curated climate. As you walked on the streets, the answers threw themselves at you. Singaporeans have values. They are disciplined. They have a disciplined Public Service guided by a set of values which they abide by religiously (they are not fanatical Christians or Muslims). And they begin imbibing the right values in children from the cradle. Ghana’s birth sibling understands that good governance calls for the right set of values to be cultivated and upheld across the Public Service.
Could our Motherland Ghana cultivate and entrench a set of values that will prompt public servants to do their duties honestly, without fear or favour? Could our beloved country cultivate a public servant who goes the extra mile to help fellow citizens without expecting glorious handshakes in return?
The work starts at dawn. From the cradle where we catch them young before the hunger for banku and okro soup, the crave for pizza, burgers and hotdogs, or the appetite for Rolls-Royce, Bugatti and Ferrari corrupt their clean, innocent brains. After baking your cake of values, ice it with high standards of integrity. When public servants have integrity, they gain the trust of their people who will be with them through thick and thin.
And Singapore says, when you hire them, train them to focus on efficiency and innovation. There must be continuous learning in our public service to keep sharpening their skills, while performance-based incentives are applied to ensure accountability. Competency-based performance appraisals must frequently be conducted by private consulting firms to identify and retool skills gaps. The appraisals will also feed into a reward system aimed at sharpening and motivating performance. This must replace Ghana’s system of remuneration which favours longevity of service and seniority. Besides, Singapore’s long-term planning and data-driven policymaking is tailored towards enhancement of service delivery.
The Public Service system of our twin country constantly builds and improves on previous performance with each plan and action tailored towards a cohesive social development. They have their eye on the ball: transformation and the pursuit of sustainable growth. Each step they take is anchored on the ethos of a Public Service that embraces the fears, concerns and aspirations of Singaporeans. In effect, the Public Service strives to constantly do better with the people and for the people. It invests time and effort to pre-empt future challenges and device ways of addressing them.
Some key take-to-Ghanas from Singapore: Ghana might consider integrating foresight and futures thinking into planning and policy-making. One way of achieving this is to establish a ministry or department that concentrates solely on long-term research, addressing potential blind spots in policies and experimenting with new foresight and varied methodologies. But until we purge ourselves of the sin of using hastily assembled, NDC/NPP manifestoes to deliver short-term projects to claim renewal of political mandates every four years, we cannot reap sustained growth and development.
Also, Ghana must learn to practise bold and ‘un-ideological’ policy borrowing. The truth is, Ghana is a policy copycat. A blind policy copycat that is deeply consumed by the political ideology of the governing party – NDC or NPP. We cut and paste or plagiarize policies of advanced economies which fail to suit our circumstances. When you borrow, reshape to fit your body. The lesson Singapore teaches us is to be ideologically blind when seeking policy solutions. Our country must be more concerned about the best way to solve problems that produce the greatest dividends for majority of its citizens, than the ideological birthing of the policy.
The third takeaway from Singapore is that partnerships and collaboration with citizens are prerequisites to transformation. Like a fake pastor on the pulpit, Ghana loudly preaches citizen participation but practices unilateral government decision-making. The public service in Singapore has over the years appreciated the value of engaging citizens as partners in sense-making and seeking solutions for the country’s future. There is a genuine drive towards doing it together with citizens.
Last but not least, Ghana must nurture strong public sector leadership. Singapore’s Public Service thrives on meritocratic recruitment. Leaders within the Public Service are selected based on competence and character, not political connections, patronage or possession of party card. The lesson is, you cannot become a Singapore with mediocre brains whose sole claim to headship of the Public Service is their ability to obfuscate their party positions on the media or political platforms. You must recruit your best brains to fix the country. Hire your most skilled workmen to build Ghana. When you hire the best, do not go to sleep thinking they know it all. Organise leadership training by cohorts and enable immersive training to constantly keep them abreast of emerging trends and best practices.
Taking cognizance of these and several other lessons, Ghana’s Parliamentary delegation flew back home from the Global Government Summit with a strong resolve: to enforce stricter oversight and demand greater accountability from the Public Service. As they touched down in Accra, I remembered having advertised a mini-skirty write-up. So I quickly cocked my pen to prevent sewing for the reader, the long flowing gown of a nun.
So I leave you with food for thought from a 2012 Washington Post piece written by Matt Miller titled, ‘What Singapore can teach us’: “… the big thing to take away from the Singapore story thus far is this: While Americans [much like Ghanaians] fight endlessly about ‘big government’ vs. ‘small government’ yet do nothing to meet our biggest challenges, Singapore has ignored ideological claptrap and focused relentlessly on what works… Singapore thus stands as the leading modern example of how government as pragmatic problem-solver can dramatically improve people’s lives”.
