SINGAPORE SEEPS INTO AFRICA

The lesson from Yew’s Singapore is to impart quality education to the mass of the people, writes Okello Oculi

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is currently enjoying praises among African politicians and commentators on public policy issues. This is paradoxical considering that in his autobiography Yew makes no mention of African leaders. He openly celebrates being of Chinese ethnic stock and narrates travels to meet China’s communist leaders; and sharing ideas with them. In April 1955, Chou en Lai met African nationalist leaders at the historic Bandung Conference in Indonesia, the birth of ‘’South-South’’ cooperation; narrowly slipping past an American plot to shoot down the aircraft carrying him. Colonial powers and their allies did not want African leaders to catch viruses of Chinese access to freedom through guerrilla warfare and communist ideology.

In 1972, the American television network, CBS, showed Tanzania’s ambassador, Salim Ahmed Salim, dancing inside the General Assembly of the United Nations in celebration of Africa, Asia, South America and the Soviet Union being victorious in getting China to regain her membership of the United Nations, despite American opposition. Brilliant African diplomats, including Dr Diallo Telli - as Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) - had waged that diplomacy war. Mr Yew ignores this historic event though Chairman Mao Zedung thanked those he referred to as ‘’our African brothers’’.

Yew shares with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a blindness about roles played by African leaders in Commonwealth affairs. Nigeria’s Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Tanganyika’s Julius Kambarage Nyerere got racist South Africa expelled from the organisation - despite opposition by Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain. Yew was obviously not pleased with this diplomacy of antiracism. Like Thatcher, Africa’s democratisation of world politics by shedding blood in triumphant liberation wars was trivial.

Most of Yew’s admirers like what Professor Ali Mazrui once referred to as ‘’documentary radicalism’’: and recite his narrative about a small group of ‘revolutionary reformers’ constructing the architecture of a strategically located rock (located on a busy trade sea route), from ‘’a Third World to a First World country’’.

He mocks idiocies of new African actors in a brutal world of global politics and economics. While on a visit to Ghana, he met a minister in Nkrumah’s young government who imported a golden bed as a status symbol; and the vanity of a Minister of Finance in Tafawa Balewa government who wore a robe with a tail that swept the earth upon which he walked. In both countries, less than one per cent of the population could read and write. Africa’s rulers were evidently not aware of the responsibilities of independence.

Yew learnt much from the impact of Japan’s 1868 Meiji Revolution and its invention of industrial development to

IN 2017, CHINA WILL GRADUATE EIGHT MILLION STUDENTS FROM LOCAL UNIVERSITIES. IF, AS EXPECTED, THEY ARE OF THE HIGHEST QUALITY, AFRICAN COUNTRIES MUST MAKE ’FAKE EDUCATION’ A MATTER OF TREASON

protect Japan from ravages of opium which Britain and the United States had gotten China’s leaders addicted to. Japanese expulsion of British, French and Dutch colonialism from South-East Asia also recommended lessons of how a small Asian country ran its governance.

One vital lesson was Japan’s dictum that deposits of diamond, gold, oil, copper, zinc and other metals (which other countries had inside their soils), were INSIDE HEADS OF JAPANESE people if they are rigorously educated with high quality skills and reading materials. For Yew’s miniscule Singapore this dictum was of great value. Like all great thinkers, he added his own twist; one which came readily to a person grown on watching commercial ships coming and going from and to distant economies bordering oceans.

He would attract multinational corporations to Singapore as their regional anchors; with eyes watching vast markets ranging from India to China, eastern Russia and Australia. Since Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) seeks well-educated workers, Singapore would seduce and keep them by producing vast numbers of highly skilled, disciplined, accountable and transparent; and committed to excellence in the work they do. FDI and government institutions do not need BRILLIANT CROOKS and thieves. Like Japan, Yew exploited Buddhism’s focus on excellence to support creativity and innovation in products. An excellent education infrastructure attracts productive FDI. America’s major harvest from World War 2 remains intensive investment in inventiveness and creativity.

In Nigeria high quality education attracts migration to other lands of children of rich families with uncertain hopes of acquiring high levels of excellence. The notion of high quality brain power of the country’s mass population as a force to drive development is crippled by colonial legacies of ignoring brains of the vast majority of the people. Britain’s leaders ensured excellence in educational attainments for few members of the class sent out to run colonies. This legacy combines with attitudes of ruling groups fearful of losing power to children of the mass public. In various states either low or total lacks of education remain stubbornly rooted.

The revelation that a huge number of primary school teachers were virtually illiterate and failed tests for 4th Grade pupils had been reported by a British NGO to apply to conditions in Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi, Kaduna, Borno and other states.

Nelson Mandela gave primacy to the power of education. The lesson from Yew’s Singapore must be to abandon what a Brazilian minister called the ‘’idiocy’’ of DENIED QUALITY EDUCATION TO VAST MASSES of African peoples.

In 2017, China will graduate eight million students from local universities. If, as expected, they are of the highest quality, African countries must make ‘’fake education’’ a matter of treason.