Is Singapore a role model we must emulate?

By Susirith Mendis

(susmend2610@gmail.com)

I was prompted to write this post after I read the article in ‘The Island’ newspaper titled “The MPH Formula of Singapore” on 25th April 2022, by an anonymous author.

For the past few decades, especially since 1977, when JRJ said that he would make Sri Lanka a ‘Singapore’, this comparison between Sri Lanka and Singapore had been bandied about, ad nauseum. So many have been eulogising Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) and the ‘Singapore miracle’ that he created from next to nothing. Singapore is the role model that is being held up for us to emulate.

It was said in that article, that “the need of the hour for Sri Lanka” is the ‘MPH Formula’ – Meritocracy, Pragmatism and Honesty – of Singapore; that it is the magic formula that made Singapore what it is. Nobody will disagree that the ‘MPH Formula’ is necessary for good governance and economic development of any country. But do we need to take Singapore as a role model for such governance?

Is this formula a true representation of Singaporean governance? Or, is this a half-truth with a dark underbelly deliberately withheld in the uninformed enthusiasm (or desperation) to seek role models? Why not look closer for the real truth? Why not be both truthful and realistic and call Singapore’s magic formula MPHD or MPHA? Why not add the words dictatorship or autocracy to it?

Take an unblinkered closer look at the economic miracles of the ‘Four Asian Tigers’ – Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Between the early 1960s and 1990s, they underwent rapid industrialisation and maintained exceptionally high growth rates. They were called ‘The Asian Miracles’. If you wish, you can add the other Asian ‘miracles’ to this list – Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

There is a common thread that runs through all these ‘miracles’ (perhaps with the exception of the then British-ruled Hong Kong) – political repression and authoritarianism. Since I do not wish to make this too lengthy an article, I will limit myself to who LKY really was, and how his ‘Singapore Miracle’ came into being.

1. Repression by LKY

Let us begin with a quote from the horse’s mouth:

“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters – who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.”

(Lee Kuan Yew – The Straits Times, April 20, 1987)

LKY said the following to one of the “silver-tongued, but more principled member of the Opposition” in independent Singapore’s first parliament, J.B. Jeyaretnam:

“If you are a troublemaker … it’s our job to politically destroy you. Put it this way. As long as J.B. Jeyaretnam stands for what he stands for – a thoroughly destructive force – we will knock him. Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one.”

The New York Times reported on Nov. 16, 1986, that Mr. J.B. Jeyaretnam, a Tamil of Sri Lankan descent, who was the leader of Singapore’s parliamentary opposition was sentenced to a token month in prison and stripped of his seat in the country’s legislature. At that time, LKY’s People’s Action Party (PAP) held 77 of the 79 seats in Parliament. The opposition, thereby, was reduced to just one MP. Has anybody wondered why the PAP has held power continuously since 1959 – even before Singapore’s independence from Malaya? If not, why not?

With incredibly petty vindictiveness, LKY’s government pursued Chee Soon Juan, who was fired in 1993 from his teaching job at the National University of Singapore after he had joined an Opposition party, and who was repeatedly imprisoned and bankrupted simply for joining an Opposition party and for holding small street demonstrations to air criticisms that state-controlled media wouldn’t publish. Since 2002, he had been repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for organising a rally to promote workers’ rights; he has regularly faced legal charges for speaking out about undemocratic practices in Singapore in the past and has twice been imprisoned for speaking in public without a permit; and fined S$20,000 (US$15,720) for “making an address in a public place without a license”.

Chee Soon Juan was the secretary-general of the Opposition Singapore Democratic Party (SDP). He has been convicted four times, in each case for speaking in a public area with street vendors for four to five minutes about upcoming elections ultimately held in May 2006. The courts convicted Chee of violating the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act (PEMA), which provides that “any person who provides … any public entertainment without a license under this Act, shall be guilty of an offense and shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $10,000.”

Thor Halvorssen, President of the Human Rights Foundation, published an open letter to LKY’s son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, noting that, “In the last 20 years he (Dr. Chee) has been jailed for more than 130 days on charges including contempt of Parliament, speaking in public without a permit, selling books improperly, and attempting to leave the country without a permit. Today, your government prevents Dr. Chee from leaving Singapore because of his bankrupt status … It is our considered judgment that having already persecuted, prosecuted, bankrupted and silenced Dr. Chee inside Singapore, you now wish to render him silent beyond your own borders.”

Another one-time founding father of Singapore, its former Solicitor General Francis Seow, had to flee the country after declaring that its Law Society, which he headed, could comment critically on government legislation. Seow was arrested and detained for 72 days under Singapore’s Internal Security Act on allegations that he had received funds from the United States to enter Opposition politics. Seow lives in exile in Massachusetts, where he has been a fellow at the East Asian Legal Studies Programme and the Human Rights Programme at Harvard Law School.

Here is the first two paragraphs of the foreword to the second edition of the Amnesty International Report on Singapore in 1978:

“The first edition of Amnesty International’s Briefing on Singapore was published in February 1976. Since then, the Singapore Government has taken a series of actions which have led to serious violations of human rights. More men and women whom the government claim are members of or sympathizers with some branch or satellite organia0stion of the illegal Communist Party of Malaya have been arrested.

However, no formal charges have been brought against them and there is no opportunity to test the government’s allegations in court. These people can be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial by government order under the Internal Security Act. Those arrested in 1976-77 include people who have been outspoken in their criticism of the Singapore Government.

Former political detainees, some of whom spent up to 10 years in prison without trial in the 1960s, have been arbitrarily re-arrested and once again face indefinite detention without trial.

An increasing number of political detainees have made “confessions” on the State-run television and in the government-supervised press. Such “confessions”, which are usually required as a pre-condition for release, contain claims relating to allegations that they have engaged in illegal and subversive activities, but their statements are not tested in open court according to generally accepted legal practce. The “confessions” often implicate friends and associates of the detainee and are used by the government as a pretext to arrest these people.

There is growing concern, both in Singapore and abroad, at the increasing use of public “confession” to justify the arrest and imprisonment of men and women without any involvement of judicial process.”

2. Racism of LKY

Too often, Singapore is held up as the epitome of racial equality and ethnic harmony. Let us just quote LKY himself to disabuse you of that notion about Singapore.

“Now if democracy will not work for the Russians, a white Christian people, can we assume that it will naturally work with Asians?” he asked on May 9, 1991, at a symposium sponsored by the large Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

Race riots among Chinese, Indian and Muslim Malay residents of Singapore in the 1950s had taught LKY to impose “harmony” through strict allocations of resources and services along race lines: All Singaporeans carry ethnic identity cards. A policeman or government official examining the ID of a Singaporean will immediately know the race/ethnicity of that person.

Here is more from LKY:

“The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more … the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow.” (LKY in 1997, in an interview for the book ‘Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas’).

“If I tell Singaporeans – we are all equal regardless of race, language, religion, culture, then they will say, ‘Look, I’m doing poorly. You are responsible.’ But I can show that from British times, certain groups have always done poorly, in mathematics and in science. But I’m not God, I can’t change you …” (in LKY’s book ‘Success Stories’ – 2002).

Was LKY endorsing or recommending eugenics?

“People get educated, the bright ones rise, they marry equally well-educated spouses. The result is their children are smarter than those who are gardeners. Not that all the children of gardeners are duds. Occasionally two grey horses produce a white horse but very few. If you have two white horses, the chances are you breed white horses. It’s seldom spoken publicly because those who are NOT white horses say, ‘You’re degrading me’. But it’s a fact of life. You get a good mare, you don’t want a dud stallion to breed with your good mare. You get a poor foal. Your mental capacity and your EQ and the rest of you, 70 to 80% is genetic.” (in LKY’s book ‘Hard Truths’(2011)

(For more, read Jim Sleeper’s article ‘Lee Kuan Yew’s hard truths’ in ‘Open Democracy’).

3. Singapore’s migrant underclass

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” wrote George Orwell in ‘Animal Farm’. The father of Singapore and its present leaders obviously seem to agree with this jocular Orwellian understatement.

The horrible plight of the Singaporean migrant underclass was exposed to the whole world when Covid-19 hit Singapore.

As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases skyrocketed in migrant worker dormitories—where men from India, Bangladesh, and China live in cramped rooms of about 12 to 20 persons, making social distancing impossible – the government adopted a racist strategy of treating the situation as one of “two separate infections,” one affecting migrant workers in dormitories and another circulating within “our own community” in Singapore, as relayed by National Development Minister Lawrence Wong. (FP, May 6th 2020)

Purpose-built and factory-converted dormitories that housed 323,000 migrant men were an epicentre of the pandemic. Singapore has 1,427,500 migrant workers comprising 38% of its labour force. The prejudices and negative attitudes against migrant workers are well-documented in ‘Research Brief’, a document by the UN WOMEN of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in December 2020. The public (Singaporean citizens) attitudes to, and perceptions of, migrant workers have deteriorated since the previous study done in 2010, they claim. A significant percentage of Singaporean citizens (36%) are of the view that migrant workers should not be given equal pay for equal work; should not receive same work; and should not be able to join unions.

An article published by the Asia Pacific Migration Network of the ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok, Thailand, notes that foreign workers in Singapore work long hours for low pay in frequently hazardous conditions and are often abused by employers and labour contractors and “many have to endure abuse, discrimination and violations of their rights but few can obtain legal redress.”

With a total population of approx. 5.82 million (2022), roughly 1.43 million people in Singapore are in the foreign work force. Non-citizens now comprise 36% of the population compared with 14% in 1990. Singapore, in too many ways is a “fiefdom”; raising concerns that the country is starting to resemble the oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms in which low-paid overseas workers allow citizens to enjoy lives of ease.

In terms of undemocratic governance, inbuilt racism, enforced ethnic harmony and migrant forced-labour, Sri Lanka is comparatively still a haven compared with Singapore. The worst of our good governance parameters have not exceeded those that have been prevalent for decades of LKY rule. What we have instead is chronic economic underdevelopment – the scourge of many developing third world democracies.

When those who should know better, tell us that Singapore should be our ‘role model’, are they telling us to follow the despotism of LKY? Were we not shocked when an uninformed priest (Anunayake of the Asgiriya Chapter, Venduruwe Upali) asked Gotabhaya Rajapakse – Presidential candidate – to become a Hitler? It seems, from some ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ voices we have heard, that he seemed to have faulted on the name. Instead, if he had said “be like LKY” would our ‘Singapore-Model’ torch-bearers have said that anything was amiss? That we do not want the autocracy of LKY?

What we are being told by these same voices is that the final economic outcomes outweigh the democratic freedoms we treasure. A ‘miracle’ like Singapore (or South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia or Indonesia) is what counts and not its record of political repression. The oxymoronic expression ‘benevolent dictator’ is often in convenient usage and now part of the political lexicon. LKY is said to be one such rare national leader. The venerable Asgiriya Anunayake must have had a ‘benevolent dictator’ in mind when he made the unforgivable faux pas.

Or are we advocating what I mentioned at the outset – MPHD or MPHA? That dictatorship, autocracy and repression is OK if meritocracy, pragmatism and honesty is also practiced in governance? That what we need is development at any cost to individual freedoms? That democracy and civic freedoms can be sacrificed at the altar of the creation of an affluent state? That repression is OK if we are given adequate food and fuel?