Singapore’s government agencies just can’t stop themselves from introducing mascots into every single thing, however unnecessary. You know you’ve probably gone a bit overboard when there’s an actual mascot called Zippy Maree to promote a car-lite Singapore. Geez.
But it seems like the fun never stops. The Corrupt Practices Investigations Bureau (CPIB) — an agency that doesn’t need the approval of kids to investigate graft — recently launched its own mascot called Kopi Lim. Without any trace of irony.
Well, at least it’s self-aware about the absurdity of the whole thing. The mascot (which is a.. polar bear? Or a dog?) is said to have a habit of making sure its fur is always white, because, you know, it likes to keep things clean and uncorrupted. What’s more interesting is its name, Kopi Lim — a play on the phrase “lim kopi”.
We’ll let Yahoo News explain the joke:
“In Hokkien, ‘lim kopi’ literally means ‘to drink coffee’. If someone is invited to ‘lim kopi’ by the authorities, it often implies that one has fallen afoul of them.”
In another unnecessary addition, the name Kopi Lim can be regarded as an abbreviation too.
CPIB’s apparently taking the whole mascot thing rather seriously, giving it its own social media updates since yesterday, its “first day of work”.
Stay tuned next week, when the Internal Security Department (could quite possibly) launch its own mascot — a spider with a wide-reaching surveillance web that monitors everything you do and can even net you into a cocoon without trial.
