Sean Jacobs discussed Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy, and the lessons we can learn:
‘We start with self-reliance,’ said the late Lee Kuan Yew in a 1994 interview. ‘In the West today it is the opposite. The government says give me a popular mandate and I will solve all society’s problems.’
On 22 March 2015 Lee passed away at age ninety-one. The end of his remarkable life offers a sobering reflection on what it takes to actually build an economic pie and not just cut it up – a practice many of today’s democratic practitioners appear exceptional at.
Singapore now thrives alongside the Silicon Valleys and Tel Avivs of the world. Back in the 1960s, however, Malaysia effectively dusted its hands of the small nation by forcing it to break away.
A future of poverty and desperation appeared likely until Lee, warding off communist subversion and the revolving emergence of security threats, turned Singapore’s slim fortunes around. ‘He did not just pilot Singapore to prosperity,’ added Margaret Thatcher, ‘he became the most trenchant, convincing and courageous opponent of left-wing Third World nonsense in the Commonwealth.’
In his revealing memoir The Singapore Story Lee admits to flirting with socialism and Marxist theories of development – a legacy, perhaps unsurprisingly, of his Cambridge years. When taking the reins of Singapore, however, at just 35 years of age, he shed the vogue fascination of government-sponsored egalitarianism. He came to ‘realise’, unlike his post-colonial African peers, that individual self-agency and not government largesse was the true ‘driving force for progress throughout human history.’
‘That realisation had to wait until the 1960s,’ he wrote, ‘when I was in charge of the government of a tiny Singapore much poorer than Britain, and was confronted with the need to generate revenue and create wealth before I could even think, let alone talk, of redistributing it.’
His template for success had two planks – stability then education. ‘First, you must have order in a society,’ he reflected. ‘Then you have to educate rigorously and train a whole generation of skilled, intelligent and knowledgeable people.’ Lee, of course, meant a real education and real skills – more engineers and entrepreneurs, for example, versus flower-arrangers and personal fitness trainers.
Armed with an uncomfortable frankness Lee never shied away from cultural or racial explanations for Singapore’s Confucian-inspired success. As a young boy, observing sweating Indian and Chinese labourers building Singapore, Lee recorded his own cross-cultural comparisons. ‘One Chinese would carry one pole with two wicker baskets of earth,’ he told Australian journalist Paul Sheehan, ‘whereas two Indians would carry one pole with one wicket basket between them. Now that’s culture.’ This kind of steely resolve, welded to a good education and a commitment to family, meant Singaporeans developed in leaps and bounds.
