There is something uniquely Singaporean about being told that your sacrifice is too sacred to be compensated — by a man who has never had to live on it. When Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing stood up in Parliament on 27 February to rebuff Workers' Party (WP) MP Kenneth Tiong's proposal to align second-year NSF allowances with the Local Qualifying Salary of S$1,800, he reached for the language of honour and nationhood. "No amount of monetary compensation can be equated with the contributions of our NS men," he said. He urged members of the House not to reduce "this sacred duty" into a transactional relationship. It was a masterclass in using noble sentiment to avoid a straightforward question: why does a recruit in basic military training — by MINDEF's own confirmation — take home S$790 a month, while a lieutenant tops out at S$1,530, all without CPF, in a country that just posted a budget surplus of S$15 billion? I say this as someone who walked every stage of that path — regular, full-time NSman, reservist who completed the full cycle. I am not speaking from outside the system. Which is precisely why I won't stay quiet when a minister who never drew an NSF allowance tells the men who did that their service is too sacred to be compensated fairly. Let us be honest about what Chan is asking NSmen to accept. He is not asking for sacrifice in the abstract. He is asking for it in the concrete: the 5 a.m. wake-ups because your camp is on the other side of the island and the shuttle bus is your only option. The stay-in commitments that mean you are not clocking a nine-to-five — you are on call around the clock, five days a week, sometimes more. The extra duties piled on top of the ordinary ones. The berating by superiors who confuse authority with contempt. The permanent injuries some men carry quietly for the rest of their lives because the SAF needed them to push through. And beyond the two years of full-time service: the decade of reservist obligations that follow. The ops-manning exercises that mean packing a field pack on short notice. The exit permit system that reminds you, lest you forget, that MINDEF retains a claim on your movements. And let us not romanticise what those ten cycles actually look like on the ground. By law, enlistees, specialists and warrant officers are held to reservist obligations until the age of 40. Commissioned officers serve until 50. That is not ten days of inconvenience neatly bracketed off from the rest of your life. On paper, an in-camp training exercise runs a week or two. In practice, the mental overhead begins weeks earlier — the dread of disruption, the logistical scramble to hand over responsibilities at work, the guilt of leaving a young family or an ailing parent to manage without you. The hours stated in your call-up letter are a fiction. The real cost is the cognitive tax that runs from the moment the letter arrives to the moment you walk back through your front door. Add to that the money quietly bled out: transport, meals, the informal costs that no allowance covers, the client meeting you could not take, the project you had to pass to a colleague, the promotion cycle you dropped out of because your track record now has a gap your foreign-born competitor's does not.  Multiply that across ten cycles, spread over two decades of your working life, and ask yourself whether the word "duty" alone is adequate recompense — or whether it has simply become the word we use to avoid paying the bill. Then there is the category of men whose burden does not end when the in-camp training does. Fail your Individual Physical Proficiency Test (IPPT) and the state does not simply note the result and move on — it sends you back, repeatedly, for Remedial Training sessions that require you to travel across the island on your own time, around your own work schedule, to a facility that was designed for full-time soldiers and not for a forty-year-old project manager with a mortgage and a meeting at nine. Miss your IPPT window without a valid reason, or fail to report for a reservist exercise, and you are not just admonished — you can be charged, fined, or worse. Men have faced prosecution for what amounts, in civilian terms, to missing a work shift they were never properly compensated for attending in the first place. And MINDEF's own lawyers have told the courts exactly what that compensation is worth: in 2016, in proceedings arising from the death of full-time national serviceman Lee Rui Feng Dominique Sarron, the Government's Deputy Director of National Service Policy stated on affidavit that the NSF allowance "is neither a salary nor is it computed as a salary" — that it exists merely to support the serviceman's "basic personal upkeep." Not a salary. Not a wage. Basic upkeep. In 2023, when WP MP Gerald Giam asked whether allowances could be pegged to inflation given rising costs, the Senior Minister of State for Defence replied that general cost-of-living pressures did not straightforwardly apply to NSmen, since lodging, food, clothing and medical care were already provided. Dominique Sarron died in April 2012 after his platoon commander discharged six smoke grenades in a training exercise that permitted two — a finding the Committee of Inquiry described as negligent.  The family took the matter to the High Court. Under Section 14 of the Government Proceedings Act, the suit was struck out. Neither the commander nor the Government could be sued. The compensation available to the family was whatever the military pension framework provides — not what a court would assess and award. The High Court judge, in upholding the immunity, noted that it "imposes an even heavier moral burden on the SAF and its officers." He was right. The question is what discharging that moral burden actually looks like in practice. The state's position is consistent: NS is a sacred duty, not a transaction. The enforcement mechanism is entirely transactional — fail to show up, and there are financial and legal consequences. But when the state's own commanders fail in their duty and a man dies, the family's legal avenue is closed. The sanctity, it turns out, runs in one direction only. For some men, NS cost them a girlfriend. The time was not there, and neither was the money. For others, it cost them a sporting career — a regional or international competition foregone because NS duties take precedence over everything. For others still, it cost them their mental health: the misfit who could not reconcile his character with the regiment, through no fault of his own, trapped in a unit that had no space for him. Some of what I have described has improved over the years — and I will acknowledge that honestly. Conditions in camp, welfare measures, allowance levels: none of these are static, and men who served a decade ago will recognise changes that those who served in the 1980s could not have imagined. But here is what has not changed, and never will: the sacrifices already made. The years already given. The injuries already sustained. The opportunities already foregone. For the men who went through it, no subsequent policy improvement reaches back in time. You cannot legislate a refund on youth. What was taken cannot be returned — and to respond to that irreversible reality with a speech about sacred duty, rather than a meaningful commitment to fair pay for those still serving now, is to compound the original debt with fresh contempt. Chan would say these are the costs of nationhood. In my view, he is right — but only partially. Duty and compensation are not mutually exclusive. Tiong made precisely this point, calmly and correctly: SAF regulars serve the same mission, defend the same sovereignty, and receive market-rate salaries with CPF contributions. Nobody accuses them of cheapening the national cause. The distinction Chan is drawing is not a principled one. It is a convenient one. This is not a new argument. It is not even a twenty-year-old one — it is older than that. In March 2004, PAP backbencher Leong Horn Kee stood in Parliament during the Budget debate and said what Kenneth Tiong would say again twenty-two years later: that NSF servicemen are relatively poorly paid compared to regulars, that the gap should be narrowed or eliminated, and that NS years should be formally recognised as career seniority in both the civil service and the private sector, so that men who served are not penalised against non-Singaporean colleagues who spent those same years building experience and employer relationships. Leong was not an opposition MP testing the Government's patience. He was a PAP man speaking from within the party's own benches. A year later, in 2006, then-Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean stood in the same Parliament and acknowledged plainly that government initiatives to recognise NSmen's efforts "can never fully compensate our NSmen for their sacrifice."  MINDEF's own minister conceded the point, and still nothing structural changed. In that same 2006 debate, PAP MP Dr Amy Khor — later a minister herself — catalogued what NS actually demands: the 5 a.m. stand-by beds, the night navigation exercises, the twenty-kilometre route marches in full battle order. She asked whether all of it could possibly be worth a mere $3,000 fine for a defaulter. She was making a point about penalties. But the logic is identical: if the sacrifice commands more than S$3,000 as punishment for those who dodge it, it commands more than S$790 a month for those who do not. The men serving today are asking the same question Singaporeans were asking in 2004 and 2006. They are receiving the same answer. The only thing that has changed is that the cost of living is higher, the new citizen intake is larger, and the minister delivering the non-answer has more medals on his chest. And here is where Chan's personal biography becomes relevant — not as an ad hominem, but as a matter of standing. Chan Chun Sing entered the SAF on a government scholarship worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He has said, in his own words, exactly why he took it. Speaking at the Defence Scholarship Awards Ceremony in August 2025, he told recipients: "Very few of us would have thought about the prestige; even fewer would have thought about the mission and the responsibilities... It was all about getting a job." A university place and a guaranteed income. By his own account, a transaction. He rose through the SAF's ranks as a scholar-general, compensated at rates that bear no resemblance to the NSF allowance, and was eventually paid at the ministerial level — salaries benchmarked to the private sector specifically because Singapore decided, long ago, that you cannot ask capable men to sacrifice their earning potential indefinitely. The logic of market-rate compensation was applied generously to him at every stage. It is being withheld, on grounds of civic duty, from the 19-year-old sleeping in a bunk. In the same speech, Chan told the scholarship recipients that "all great things start from taking care of the men and women under our charge." The men receiving S$790 a month — which his own ministry's lawyers told the High Court is not a salary — are also under his charge. And at the close of that speech, he offered this: "Being a Singaporean must be a matter of conviction and not a matter of convenience." He entered the SAF, by his own admission, as a matter of convenience. The NSman who faces prosecution for missing a reservist cycle had no say in the matter at all. The lecture on conviction lands differently when you know who is delivering it. The counterargument from MINDEF is familiar: allowances have been raised four times in the past decade; the NS HOME package provides CPF top-ups; servicemen receive up to S$6,500 upon completion. These are not nothing. But they are not the point either. Run the actual numbers. SAF annual intake averaged 17,300 between 2021 and 2025. With over 95 per cent completing the full two-year term, approximately 17,300 NSFs are in their second year at any given time. The gap between a corporal's current allowance of S$865 — the minimum a second-year NSF would draw — and the S$1,800 LQS is S$935 a month. Across 17,300 men over twelve months, that comes to approximately S$194 million annually — still within striking distance of Tiong's S$150 to S$200 million estimate, and amounting to 0.83 per cent of a defence budget whose military expenditure line alone stands at S$23.27 billion in FY2026. This is not a fiscal argument Chan is making. The money is there. It is a rounding error on MINDEF's books. What Chan is defending is a principle — the principle that NS must never be framed as compensable labour. Which raises the uncomfortable question: whose interests does that principle actually serve? There is one more layer worth noting. The S$24.9 billion defence budget is, by design, largely opaque. A significant portion of military expenditure is not subject to the line-by-line public scrutiny that other ministries face. We accept this. National security demands it, and most Singaporeans extend that trust without complaint. But consider what we are being asked to accept simultaneously: that we cannot examine how the billions are spent, yet we must take MINDEF's word that there is insufficient justification to pay a second-year NSF a living wage. The same national security imperative that shields the budget from public accountability is, in fact, the strongest argument for ensuring the men who underwrite that security are properly compensated. If we cannot audit the expenditure, the least the government can do is demonstrate good faith toward the people the expenditure is supposed to protect and empower. Instead, what we get is selective transparency — the budget is classified when scrutiny is inconvenient, and the arithmetic is suddenly available when it is time to explain why S$194 million cannot be found. You cannot have it both ways. Either the defence of Singapore is serious enough to warrant proper pay for the men doing it — or it is not. What Chan fears — that framing NS as compensable erodes the social compact — may carry some weight in theory. In practice, the compact is already being eroded. It is being eroded every year that new male citizens arrive exempt from the obligations borne by every Singaporean-born man. It is being eroded every time a former NSman watches a newcomer move into the career, the housing, the social infrastructure his service helped defend — without having given anything in return. The numbers make the grievance impossible to dismiss as sentiment. On 26 February 2026 — the day before Chan's parliamentary performance — Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong announced that Singapore intends to grant between 25,000 and 30,000 citizenships annually over the next five years, with roughly 25,000 already conferred in 2025.  The ICA's own data for 2024 tells you who these people are: of 22,766 new citizens granted that year, 55.9 per cent were above the age of 30 at the time of citizenship. Under MINDEF's longstanding policy, the male half of that cohort is exempt from NS entirely — too old to enlist, the argument goes, and not having benefited from Singapore's social infrastructure in their youth. And 81.1 per cent of new citizens aged 20 and over hold post-secondary qualifications. These are not people on the margins of the economy. They are educated, working-age professionals walking straight into the same job market as men who spent two years in a bunk, followed by a decade of reservist liability. Jonathan Tee, a former pilot trainee who served his full reservist duty cycle, put the contradiction plainly: the men who gave up their prime are now competing against people who gave up nothing. And they are competing on unequal terms. NS does not merely cost time — it creates a visible gap on a résumé, a period where career capital was not being built while a foreign-born peer was accumulating experience, credentials, and employer relationships. No tax relief closes a promotion gap. No LifeSG credit compensates for the client you did not win, the role you did not apply for, or the two years a competitor spent getting ahead while you were doing guard duty. To then tell these men that framing their service in financial terms corrodes the social compact is not just tone-deaf — it is asking them to absorb a concrete economic disadvantage in silence, and to feel honoured for doing so. Two days after Chan's parliamentary statement, Tee published his response. "This IS betrayal on our sacrifices for the nation," he wrote. That is a strong word. But it is the word that accumulates when the system asks everything of you — your youth, your health, your career trajectory, two years of your prime followed by a decade of reserve liability — and responds to a modest request for fair pay with a lecture about the sacred nature of service. Chan says he will be the first to champion NSmen. The men who served are still waiting. They are not waiting for another speech about sacred duty, or another round of LifeSG credits, or another assurance that their sacrifice is beyond price. They know what "beyond price" means now — it is what a well-suited man says when he has decided not to reach into his breast pocket. The wallet is there. It has always been there. He simply finds it more convenient to invoke your honour than to open it.       https://theonlinecitizen.com/2026/03/07/ns-is-a-duty-the-sacrifice-is-real-the-pay-is-not  

no    to save some money as food prices will  rise for sure   petrol already surge

Another goh chok tong lookalike

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