Happy Birthday Singapore! My Home & My Country!

As a Citizen reading PM ND message to Singaporeans below, quote:

“This is how we do things in Singapore – always daring to dream, setting our sights on the next frontier, and searching for better solutions and fresh possibilities,” said Mr Lee. “We look and plan ahead not just for the next five or 10 years, but for the next 30 or 50 years and beyond.” unquote.

How I wished that for the last 30 years since Year 1992, my Singapore would have dreamt of having her own population, one that is organically grown through the births of our Citizens, not one that is imported with what we have now at 3.99m (Citizens+PRs). The graph below tells us that 3.50m are Singapore Citizens. This is after PRs have converted to become Singapore Citizens.

Fig.1

Using data from Key Demographic Indicators from the Dept of Statistics Singapore (see Fig.2 below)From the Year 2000 to Year 2010 we had an increase of Singapore Citizens of 245,000 (through natural births & PRs conversion to New Citizens). The Year 2000 was the Year of the Dragon giving rise to a spike in natural births as we see later. For this same period, there was an addition of 253,000 PRs. In these 10 years, our country Resident population increased by a whopping 498,000! Next our Total Population increased by 551,000 during this same period. The difference between the Total Population and Resident Population during this period was 1.049m. The increase in our Resident population was 498k. Therefore, the difference of 551k (1.049m less 498k) would be the foreign workers, their spouses, children and extended family members, foreign domestic workers, foreign students and others.

Fig.2

The data in Table 1 from the Year 2010 to Year 2020 tells us that PRs had reduced by 19k (Year 2010: 541k, Year 2020: 521k). However, Singapore Citizens for the same period had increased by 292k. Over a 10 years period, PRs had remained fairly constant or reducing by 1.9k per year. Singapore Citizens had increased by 29.20k per year. This increase was mainly due to conversion of PR to New Citizens over this period as it can be inferred from Fig.3 below that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) had been decling over the last 20 years from Year 2000 to Year 2020.

Fig.3

If TFR has been declining, it means that the number of babies born over the last 20 years (Year 2000 to Year 2020) would also be declining. If we see the Fig.4 below Residents Live-Births have been declining over the last 20 years. This means that all Citizens (original SG Citizens and New Citizens) had not been giving birth to more babies.

Fig.4

Today, this challenge of not being able to increase our TFR remains. From this pandemic, it’s obvious that we need a lot of our own manpower to run our essential services. What’s the solution then? PM said, to quote,”

“We must never stop imagining and building the Singapore we want, even as we strengthen our guard against what can go wrong,” said Mr Lee.”unquote.

Never stop imaginging how our Pro-creation policies must be daring and unconventional enough to reverse the TFR. If we are daring enough from this day to do what is needed to give birth and raise a new generation of our own people, the TFR can be increased, 30 years later, we can have more of our own people to contribute to the prosperity and growth of Our Home, Our Country! I hope I can see this happening in my lifetime.

Contributor:

Victor Chan