Don’t insult the hard-working Singaporeans, Premier Zille

IT SEEMS Singapore and the late PM Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) have a new ardent supporter.

Pity your visit to Singapore was at the tail end of your career in politics rather than at the beginning, Premier Zille.

Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, Lesotho, Swaziland, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, famous Zimbabwe and the Lancaster agreement, and Zambia were all British colonies and inherited British systems. Why did they fail? Singapore has an appalling human rights and media freedoms record. This is not British. LKY often joked countries with regular elections are more backward than Singapore with his poor human rights record. He makes no apologies for that. In fact, just before Tata Mandela’s release Singapore would have had the world’s longest serving political prisoner! His response was like PW’s: renounce communism and you are free to walk tomorrow.

As for Singapore, the history is as follows. Lee Kuan Yew believed Britannia would rule the waves until the Japanese occupation.

This showed him how weak the Brits were and how strict and thorough the Japanese were.

For shoplifting you are hanged and your body is on display.

At a rally in 1961 he clearly stated his party was anti-colonial.

During his education in London he saw his “rulers” doing menial tasks and said “this nation cannot rule us”.

As Philip Bowring said, “He saw enough of British failures not to want to ape them” (Straits Times, March 27, 2015). Given run-ins with Malaysia’s Tunku, who feared LKYs intellect and ability, Singapore was on its own.

Only a British port with a few soldiers and a humid, malaria-infested swamp of which even Charlie Munger says: forget about Plato’s Republic; see LKYs Singapore.

English was made compulsory for all people and the medium of instruction.

Can we do this and drop Afrikaans at all schools and universities, Premier Zille? A reversal of June 16. A Dutch adviser, Dr Albert Winsemius, who read the riot act to LKY, made it very clear: eliminate communists and keep the statue of Stamford Raffles (page 66, Third World to First: The Singapore Story).

Aided by Goh Keng Swee, who was his implementer, LKY took care of politics and economics and Goh Keng Swee got the show on the road – for example, Jurong, which Thatcher copied in Dockands.

Geography and demography played a crucial role.

Sitting on the Straits of Malacca, on the periphery of a 1.5 billion population zone and the busiest shipping lanes in the world, Singapore was Dubai and China rolled in one in the 1970s.

LKY struck up friendships with all countries, including the then frugal Sultan of Brunei, Sir Omar Ali Saifuddien. So much so that when Brunei had to chose Malaysia or Singapore, he went with Singapore.

Deng Xiopeng, after calling LKY “the running dogs of capitalism”, got his wake-up call on his first visit to the “little red dot” on the map and copied his model for the modern cities we see today in China.

As for property rights: it was late Baroness Thatcher who copied his idea of giving people title deeds to their “council” homes and the idea of private home ownership took off in the UK.

So LKY taught the British about private home ownership. It was not the other way around. One politician commented LKY “was the best Englishman East of the Suez”, however Singapore was, and really is, its own brand.

The greatest injustice is to say Singapore copied the British or was successful because of the British colonial history.

LKY and Goh Keng Swee were political and economic dynamos on their own, and after being dropped by Britain, they took the ball and ran with it. They may speak, dress and act English, but in the end their ancestry, DNA and leadership is Chinese with 5 000 years of governance, civilisation and history.

Don’t ever think to insult a proud, hard-working, clever, street-smart nation by saying that colonialism made them. Muhammad Omar Durban North