[The following are excerpts from a paper entitled “Lee Kuan Yew: Leading Singapore, Lessons In Leadership,” submitted to Atty. Damcelle Torres Cortes, Professor in Development Management 201- Managerial Leadership, University of the Philippines – Los Banos (UPLB) – Fidel M. Arcenas]
Almost half century ago, one magazine described a diamond-shaped island at the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula as a “cesspool of squalor and degradation.” Its population was a “disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and Dutch East Indies.” [1]
Today, that same diminutive state, with an area of only 699 square-kilometers – 499 times less than the area of the Philippines, ranks among the world’s economic giants.
How did Singapore rise from the third to the first rank of nations? One answer unfailingly stands out: Lee Kuan Yew.
TIME Asia’s Simon Elegant wrote: “Lee (Kuan Yew) is famous for his formidable personality and unshakeable faith in his own convictions. Combine those qualities with a burning intelligence, a cold-eyed pragmatism and an unrelenting focus on his goals and you have some sense of the man who almost single-handedly transformed a sleepy tropical port into one of the world's most economically vibrant city-states.”
Henry A. Kissinger described Singapore’s rise from inferiority to superiority, with Lee Kuan Yew at the helm:
“Located on a sandbar, with nary a natural resource, Singapore had in the 1960s a polyglot population of slightly over a million (today over 3 million) of which 75.4 percent was Chinese, 13. 6 percent Malay, and 8.6 Indian. It adjoined in the south with Indonesia, with a population of over 1 million (now nearly double that), and in the north with Malaya (later Malaysia) with a then population of 6.28 million. The smallest country in Southeast Asia, Singapore seemed destined to become a client state of more powerful neighbors, if indeed it could preserve its independence at all.
“Lee Kuan Yew thought otherwise. Every great achievement is a dream before it becomes reality, and his vision was of a state that would not simply survive but prevail by excelling. Superior intelligence, discipline, and ingenuity would substitute for resources. Lee Kuan Yew summoned his compatriots to a duty they had never previously perceived: first to clean up their city, then to dedicate to overcome the initial hostility of their neighbors and their own ethnic divisions by superior performance.
“The Singapore of today is his testament. Annual per capita income has grown from less than $1,000 at the time of independence to nearly $30,000 today. It is the high-tech leader of Southeast Asia, the commercial entrepot, the scientific center. Singapore plays a major role in the politics and economics of Southeast Asia and beyond.“[2]
Of Lee Kuan Yew, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said: "In office, I read and analyzed his every speech. He had a way of penetrating the fog of propaganda and expressing with unique clarity the issues of our times and the way we tackle them. He was never wrong."
US President Richard Nixon, admiring Lee’s leadership, once said that had he lived in another time and place, he might have “the stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone."
Singapore’s success is also written in the lives of its citizens. Take as an example the story of Goh Pang Meng as reported by Jay Branegan in the January 18, 1993 issue of TIME Asia: “Had (Goh Pang Meng) the son of a poor immigrant street vendor from China lived somewhere else, he would probably be struggling to survive in a thatched hut like the one in which he grew up with 11 brothers and sisters. At 44, Goh owned a comfortable five-room apartment and lived, like 87% of his countrymen, in a government housing project. He has three children, the minimum politically correct number preferred for the well- educated by a eugenics-inspired government: he received a $12,500 tax credit for the third birth, and his wife, who helped out in his business, got an additional 15% annual tax cut, because she had advanced past high school. He runs a firm with 17 employees making computer screens, and rents factory space in one of the 28 government industrial parks scattered around the island republic. "Overall," he says, "life in Singapore is pretty good."[3]
Lee Kuan Yew nurtured Asian values within the context of cultural differences between the East and the West in a globalised environment. He ardently cultivated a Western-style free economic market while maintaining a communitarian political philosophy. He once observed that Asians have “little doubt that a society with communitarian values where the interests of society take precedence over that of the individual suits them better than the individualisf America.”
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