Unfinished Business

Last chance to show Wong can sing.

Singapore's then Minister Mentor (MM) said in an April 2008 email interview that the daring escape of Mas Selamat Kastari from the notorious Whitley Road Detention Centre (WRDC) on 27 February was a "very severe lesson in complacency". MM Lee said the country's security officers knew that fugitive Mas Selamat was "an escape artist", who had evaded arrest many times. "When you are complacent in handling a wily detainee, then you have been negligent," he concluded.

Mas Selamat was captured by Malaysian police during a raid on a house in Kampung Tawaka, Skudai, on 1 April 2009. Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng told Parliament on October 2010 that Mas Selamat "has not given a completely reliable account" of how he evaded being discovered even as a nationwide manhunt was launched to find him, as well as how he made his way to Malaysia. The nation remembers being informed earlier of another incomplete account, that either Mas Selamat was in Singapore, or he was not in Singapore.

Even as Wong, 68, announced yesterday he would not be contesting in the imminent General Election of 2015, many questions about the jailhouse breakout that would forever be associated with his complacency and negligence, are still not answered. Questions like who's bank account the $1 million bounty for information leading to the apprehension of Mas Selamat was deposited into. Or if the two individuals who made the offer ever paid up.

"I've walked through this long journey, more than three-quarters of my working life," Wong told adoring fans at his swansong. "Don't you think I deserve a rest?" Like the albatross weighing down on the seafarer in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Wong must have been burdened by the stigma of the Mas Selamat saga. Just as another jailbird, Amos Yee, will be the curse on the last politician standing from his batch of 1984.