Special Feature Development

Lee Kuan Yew (pictured right), the founding president of

Singapore, succeeded partly because he combined a rare
intellectual capacity with an equally rare executive capacity, which
usually exclude one another. For now, writes Dr Moses Anafu. the
people of Singapore have accepted a tight discipline as the price
of prosperity. But what happens when the system is no longer in a
position to deliver its side of the bargain? How do they manage the
rush into "freedom" when the constraints on society are removed?

Why the enduring

admiration for
Lee Kuan Yew

FIRST CAME ACRO.SS L E E K U A N Y E W ' S

name in 1968 while reading Kwame

Nkrumah's book. Dark Days in Ghana. In the immediate wake ofthe 24
February 1966 coup that overthrew
him, Nkrumah received many messages
of support from all over the world. Only a
representative sample of these letters was
published in the book.
Written in the heat and passion of the
moment, most of them were a shade too
emotional, a few were outright hysterical. In this medley, the statement by Lee
Kuan Yew, the then president of Singapore,
struck me as a piece apart. It was short and
written with a judicial calm.
Lee began his statement by saying that
it had taken him two weeks to compose his
thoughts. He had visited Nkrumah's Ghana on two occasions and did not "believe
that [the] political changeover has written finis to the chapter of what has gone
before". He went on: "The Ghanaians

64 1 November 20111 New African

are a vigorous and lively people and they

deserve all the vision and leadership which
you strove to give them, to make Ghana
into a strong modern part of an Africa
whose unity you have always espoused...
May what you stand for, a united Africa
and a great Ghana, triumph and flourish".
No other statement of solidarity in the
book could match Lee's in grandeur, genuineness and beauty of simplicity. Who was
this Far Eastern leader, I began to wondet,
who could write so well-meaningly about
out country and its future? At the time and
given where I was, I could find no material
to hand which might have enlightened me
about Lee himself or his country, Singapore, until I came to England.
In the Cambridge ofthe 1970s, it was
still possible to run into people who had
been Lee's contemporaries at Cambridge
University and who had stayed on to pursue academic careers. Such people invariably spoke of Lee's academic record with

undisguised awe and admiration.

This was hardly surprising - he had
carried oflF all the prizes and wound up
with a rarity called a starred first in the
final law exams. The more 1 heard, the
more I wanted to know about this clearly
fascinating individual.
Then, at the beginning of 1979,1 joined
the Political Afl^airs Division (PAD) ofthe
Commonwealth Secretariat and began to
attend the biennial Heads of Government
Meetings (CHOGM). I was one of those
Secretariat officials with direct responsibility for the record ofthe Meetings,
and in effect I had a ringside .seat at the
proceedings, a privileged opportunity to
hear Commonwealth leaders v/Va voce.
Commonwealth Heads of Government
Meetings were in a class of their own.
Everything about them - from the seating
arrangements right down to the use of first
names, was designed to facilitate a genuine exchange of views. Documentation

"Lee Kuan Yew is universally acknowledged

to have transformed Singapore from a fishing
village into a flourishing economic powerhouse"

was kept to a minimum and reading out

speeches from prepared texts strenuously
discouraged. In the result, debates at the
summits were models of their kind. The
meetings threw up a number of stars but
for the purposes of this piece, I will confine
myself to some of the most outstanding of
these leaders.
From the old Commonwealth there
was Pierre Trudeau of Canada, as intellectually brilliant as he was physically
handsome. In a debate on World Peace and
Disarmament, he quoted Immanuel Kant's
"Perpetual Peace" essay from memory
and when I came to check the quotation

against the original text, I found his citation to be word-perfect.

Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had by the
late 1970s become one of the Commonwealth's elder statesmen who had seen and
done more than most around the table. He
spoke with unrivalled authority on world
issues generally but especially so on the
issues of Southern Africa. He and Dr Kenneth Katinda of Zambia brought moral
grandeur to Commonwealth meetings.
Mrs Indira Gandhi generally spoke little but when she did, she tended to leave
lasting impressions, not least by asking
unanswerable questions. India, she once

said, was all for nuclear disarmament,

but wbo around the table could tell her
how India was to recover that part of her
territory which China had invaded and
occupied since 1964 against international
law and entreaties.
Michael Manley of Jamaica, Forbes
Burnham of Guyana, and indeed all the
Caribbean leaders displayed a grasp of
international political and economic issues that simply compelled admiration.
Listening to the West Indian leaders, one
wondered whether the boast that the region had more talent per square mile than
the Greece of classical antiquity was all
that exaggerated.
The leadership of the Commonwealth
Secretariat was equally distinguished. Sir
Sonny Ramphal, as secretary general, was
nominally the servant of the heads of government. In reality, he was equal to the
best of them and they knew it. Sonny
Ramphal was a man of broad and consummate capacity, with a powerful intellect,
a fervid imagination and an indomitable
will. His speeches were models of oratory
and polished diction. He loved work. In
fact, industry seemed to come so naturally
to him that it was difficult to think of any
aspect of his work as a task.
Chief EmekaAnyaoku of Nigeria, Sonny's deputy and later on his successor as
secretary general, was an unerring judge
of men and circumstances. A trained classicist, he took to diplomacy like a duck to
water and on any view of the matter, he
would have given any Kissinger a run for
his money. I should know, for I observed
him in action at many of the Commonwealth's most delicate negotiations, including those leading to the end of apartheid
in South Africa.
To impress a Commonwealth thus constituted took some rare ability, but Lee
Kuan Yew consistently emerged as tbe
star of Commonwealth summits. In fact,
he carried it off with such nonchalance
as would have defied the imagination of
Castiglione himself
Lee spoke in measured tones and periods in which every word was in its place
and every sentence told. He also spoke
with the confidence which comes to a
man universally acknowledged to have
pulled off something of a miracle: the
transformation of what had been as late
as the 1950s, a little fishing village into a

New African I November 20111 65

Special Feature! Development

flourishing economic powerhouse; or to

paraphrase his own words, the translation
of Singapore from a developing nation into
a First World country.
How he achieved this rare feat was what
his fellow heads of government wanted to
know, and he did not disappoint them, for
it was a subject to which he was to return
time and again.
It all began in 1965 on the eve of the
break-up of the Federation of Malaya, of
which Singapore had been a constituent
part. The end of the Federation came on
top of other developments which threatened Singapore s very survival: the withdrawal of British forces east of Suez and
the disappearance of the old entrept
economy.
Without the Federation and the income
from Britain's military bases, Singapore
was left with only one option, and that
was to revitalise the entrept economy in
late 20th century conditions.
Lee and his senior colleagues held emergency meetings to define in precise terms
the constituent elements of a 20th-century
entrept economy. They agreed that such
an economy would need to give pride of
place to banking, insurance, dry-dock
services and technology in general.
In short, they agreed to make Singapore
into a service economy with a matching
resolution that in its chosen areas of specialisation, Singapore would be second
to no other country in South-East Asia.
An elite economy called for elite specialists and so the educational system was
fundamentally restructured to produce an
elite class of administrators, managers, and
entrepreneurs with the necessary drive and
dare to spearhead the country s progress.
A special premium was placed on
knowledge and skills. Information and
knowledge-gathering was accordingly
made the concern of everybody in a leadership position.
The rule required serving ministers and
officials, as well as those who had held
ministerial and other senior positions, to
submit a report to the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs upon visiting any country for the
first time, setting out what they had seen
and heard while in that country. No one is
more punctilious than Lee himself.
Thus towards the end of 1992, on the
eve of South fricas transition to a nonracial democracy and in keeping with his

66 ! November 2011 I New African

Right: The high-rise skyline of Singapore's

waterfront, built during the long reign of
Lee Kuan Yew (helow)

"Singapore is very
contrived to fit
the needs of the
modern worid. it
has to be amended
aii the time, and
the needs change.
The moment it no
ionger fuifiis tiiat
roie, it wiii begin to
deciine."

own injunctions. Lee Kuan Yew submitted a report to the government in which
he made this most pointed observation:
"South Africa is a First World economy
about to be taken over by a Ihird World
workforce."
In strict fidelity to the historical record,
the writing of these special reports was
the innovation not of Singapore, but of
another and older city state - Renaissance
Venice - which required its ambassadors
to send back home detailed reports on the
geography, history and political structure
of the state that they had visited as well
as its foreign policy and the personality
of the ruler.
Lee Kuan Yew's innovation was to extend this requirement to embrace ministers
and senior officials, serving and retired. To
the same end, the gathering of knowledge
and information. Lee encouraged his colleagues in government to circulate to each
other newspaper and journal articles as
well as books which they had read and
found useful.
At the outset. Lee defined Singapore's
foreign policy in severely utilitarian terms.
In his last address to Commonwealth leaders in Kuala Lumpur in October 1989,
he put the matter this way: "Whenever I
come to consider establishing diplomatic

relations with another country, I always

ask myself two questions. Can this country provide me with capital? Can it give
me technology? If the answers to these
questions are not 'yes' and 'yes', I will not
establish diplomatic relations with that
country."
In Singapore's foreign policy, the Association of South-East Asian Nations
(ASEAN) has priority attention, not out
of any misplaced sentimentalism about
regional solidarity, but out of hard-headed
practical calculations.
As he himself explained it at Kuala

Lumpur, all the member states of ASEAN

found themselves in dire poverty at the
end of the Second World War. They had
then, through hard work involving considerable sacrifices, brought their respective
countries to the present levels of prosperity
in the region. Fear o a return to the old
poverty was what underlay ASEAN's unity
and explained Singapore's commitment to
the regional body.
The concentration on ASEAN did not,
however, detract from Lee's interest in the
wider world and here, his interventions at
Commonwealth meetings were authoritatively insightful.
In one ofthe debates on world political
trends, Julius Nyerere said that whenever
Chinese ministers came to see him in Dar
es Salaam, they always strenuously denied
that their country was on the way to superpower status. He wondered whether
Lee could shed some light on the matter
for the benefit ofthe Meeting.
Lee's response was brief and enlightening: "The Chinese know that superpower
status is their destiny. The rest is tactics."
Having regard to everything - the inauspicious beginning; the lack of resources
of any kind except human resources; the
peculiar vulnerabilities of small states of
today's world and much else besides - it

is difficult to withhold admiration for Lee

Kwan Yew's achievement.
It is also one that gives cause for pause;
and no one better understands the potential preying threats than Lee himself.
"If [Singapore] breaks up," Lee said in 1995,
"it will never come back. It's man-made,
it's very contrived to fit the needs of the
modern world, and it has to be amended
all the time, and the needs change. The
moment it no longer fulfils that role, it
will begin to decline. I put it at one chance
in five."
Singapore seems to be a society permanently and tightly girt up as a necessary condition for its survival. But as all
admirers of Singapore must wonder from
time to time, is there a place for chance
as a decider in the system?
In August 1966, at the beginning of
the experiment. Lee made the following
categorisation: "In any society, ofthe 1,000
babies born there are so many per cent
near-geniuses, so many per cent average,
so many per cent morons."
His focus was on the near-geniuses and
the above average. "I am sorry," he said,
"if I am constantly preoccupied with what
the near-geniuses and the above average
are going to do. I am convinced that it is
they who ultimately decide the shape of

things to come. It is the above average in

any society, who set the pace."
The vanguard role envisaged for the
near-geniuses in the leadership of society,
with the above average as their close coadjutors, is recognisably Platonic; but the
consequential iron discipline may well
lead Singaporeans to regard themselves as
belonging not so much to themselves as
to their state, which is peculiarly Spartan.
It is in this blend ofthe ethos of a Platonic republic and that ofthe historical
Sparta, that Singapore may experience its
most intractable problems in the future.
The first challenge will be to ensure an
uninterrupted succession ofthe quality
of leadership appropriate to Singapore's
peculiar needs.
Lee Kuan Yew succeeded partly because
he combined a rare intellectual capacity
with an equally rare executive capacity,
which usually exclude one another.
The question then is, how does Singapore provide against a break in this almost
unique and certainly rare quality of leadership. The second challenge will be how
to manage the rush into "freedom" when
the constraints on society are removed.
For now the people of Singapore have
accepted tight discipline as the price of
prosperity. What happens when the system
is no longer in a position to deliver its side
ofthe bargain?
John Clammer, who knows Singapore
well, has noted that "there is a permanent
sense of crisis [in Singapore]... change,
construction, urgency are the key words.
But why? What is the ultimate purpose of
all this activity...? Nobody quite knows,
for the system seems to require that today's
solution is tomorrow's problem."
That, in a nutshell is the challenge
facing Lee's successors. R. H. Tawney,
the great historian ofthe i6th and 17th
centuries, once described the sensational
achievements ofthe civilisation of 17thcentury Holland as nothing short of a
pyramid balancing on its tip. With all its
future challenges, that is how Singapore
appears to my generation; and it is what
underpins our enduring admiration for
Lee Kuan Yew. WiA
(Dr Moses Anafu, now at the University
of Cambridge, was for many years the head
ofthe Political Affairs Division ofthe Commonwealth Secretariat.)

New African ! November 20111 67

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