I can’t think beyond the Oxley Road in Singapore. The street five minutes from home. Tree lined, quiet, beautiful. Leaves rustling as a soft breeze turns cool, blowing through big leafy trees, providing respite from the humidity of Singapore. I walked down this street almost everyday in the last three years.
In house number 38 lived Mr. Lee Kwan Yew, the founding father of Singapore. The first Prime Minister of Singapore. The man who brought the ‘Red Dot’ on the global map and made the tiny port city of Singapore, a First World hub. The man who was called MM Lee- Minister Mentor Lee.
We had just moved in the neighborhood, when a taxi driver told us that He lived here. There were two Gurkhas (from Singapore’s elite military force) standing on either side of the house. (That was the only thing that looked a bit different on Oxley Road). There were a couple of houses, opposite them some duplexes, and then further down, apartments. There was a traffic light with the option of red. There were boom gates on either side of the road, closed only if there was someone going out or coming in to the house. In all these years I saw that happening only once. That was also the only time I saw the bright red traffic light. As a pedestrian, I waited for not more than a minute and a half to let one car and three motorbikes pass. That was all. That was all the paraphernalia that a man of his stature maintained here. The Gurkha’s ensured that you didn’t walk on their side of the pedestrian path, and were happy to wave back to a child waving to them.
It took a while to be convinced that this was indeed the house of the man who turned things around for Singapore. And that the man himself lived here. That many a meetings deciding the future course of the country were held in this very house. (It was in the basement of this house that the 14 founding members of the People’s Action Party or PAP gathered during the British colonial administration to discuss the transition of the island from a colony to independence). A house that Lee Kwan Yew said should be demolished and built upon after his death. It is, after all, the prime area of Singapore, a step away from Orchard Road, the retail and entertainment hub of Singapore and would fetch good money and business. “I’ve told the Cabinet, when I’m dead, demolish it. Demolish my house and change the planning rules …the land value will go up. I don’t think my daughter or my wife or I, who lived in it, or my sons who grew up in it, will bemoan its loss. They have old photos to remind them of the past,” Mr. Lee Kwan Yew said. To his sensibility there is no reason to maintain it out of sentiments.
In Singapore, most people spoke of Lee Kwan Yew with awe. Scratch that awe a bit with questions on days gone by and years growing up in a Singapore very different from what it is today, and you will begin to see that with awe were intertwined threads of fear. Try to separate the threads of fear with some more questions, and you see respect and grudging gratitude in the eyes and hearts of most Singaporeans.
They would share stories of how he overstepped dialects, hampering communication between generations and established Mandarin as the only Chinese language option available in schools. (Under Lee’s bilingual policy, English was to be studied in school along with a mother tongue language- Malay, Tamil or Mandarin). Lee Kwan Yew saw that English served two purposes- 1. It served as the common language for all the ethnic communities to connect in and 2. It established an English speaking population, a prerequisite to business opportunities around the globe. Business meant growth. Growth from Third world to First world.
Alice, our neighbor told me the seriousness with which the ‘Stop at Two’ family planning campaign was run in the late 1960’s. “If you were having a third child (or more), the mother would get no maternity leave in the public sector, hospitals would charge exorbitant fee, income tax deductions would not be given. Top priority in top-tier primary schools would be given only to children whose parents were sterilized before the age of forty.” A colleague at the Singapore Memory Project told me about the ‘Great Marriage Debate’ when Lee Kwan Yew encouraged Singapore men to marry highly educated women. This led to the establishment of the Social Development Unit in 1984, a match making agency (under the Ministry of Social and Family Development) to promote socializing among female and male graduates. (It functions now as Social Development Network.) I was also told by an animated acquaintance at a food court that it was a known, proven fact that those who spoke against him politically were left bankrupt. “Public opinion means no opinion in our country,” she said. There were so many Singaporean stories I heard from professionals, retired teachers, cleaners, taxi drivers, friends, neighbors, University lecturers and young polytechnic students. Stories of difficult times, better times, troubled times, happy times, sad times, proud moments, detached lives… One rainy day a chatty taxi driver told me how in his younger days he worked at the port and made more money through tips and small bribes than his wages. He told me how his life did a head stand when Lee came with strict implementation of no corruption and zero tolerance policy towards corruption. How there were fines for everything. How from a fine city, Singapore became a city of fines. (There are fines for jaywalking-which means pedestrians crossing the road where there are no zebra lines, littering, vandalism among others; and selling of chewing gums are banned). The taxi driver lost his job at the port, got caned as punishment and had to do a vocational course to become employable again. “That man give me too much trouble lah,” he chuckled. “But he made me capable of being a taxi driver after I retired. Have to work very hard even at 70 for money, for makan (eat in Malay), but I have own house and no need ask my kids for money.”
“I’m not saying that everything I did was right,” Lee Kwan Yew admitted in an interview, “but everything I did was for an honorable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.” “…nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac…Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.” (SM Lee Kuan Yew, The Man and His Ideas, 1997)
There were many things that LKY did in an attempt to turn around Singapore. In an interview to New York Times in Sept 2010, he said, “We knew that if we were just like our neighbors, we would die. Because we’ve got nothing to offer against what they have to offer. So we had to produce something which is different and better than what they have. It’s incorrupt. It’s efficient. It’s meritocratic. It works. The system works regardless of your race, language or religion because otherwise we’d have divisions.” To make Singapore an efficient, prosperous, stable, international hub, Lee Kwan Yew closely studied countries around the globe and dissected their functioning. He borrowed and implemented all the positives and worked out his own formula of not repeating their weaknesses. “…We’ve seen Sri Lanka, when they switched from English to Sinhalese and disenfranchised the Tamils and so strife ever after… We chose – we didn’t say it was our national language – we said it was our working language, that everybody learns English whatever language medium school you go to. Which means nobody needs interpretation to read English.”
If there is one crux to the success of Singapore, it is this statement and belief of Lee Kwan Yew- “We are pragmatists. We don’t stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let’s try it and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology.” I saw many changes while in Singapore. I saw him turning back some things that he had implemented and being open to accepting that it wasn’t the best idea.
Whenever someone told me about LKY, I wondered what it would be like to meet him as I walked down Oxley Road some day. I had seen him, but not met him. I hear he was a tough man with no time or interest in polite conversation. I also heard of his soft side when I learnt that he read poetry to his bed ridden wife every night…
I tracked his health while he was in hospital. I hoped he would get well again. Well enough to celebrate 50 years of Singapore’s independence this year on 9th August. I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach when I read the press release from the Singapore Prime Minister’s office on 23rd March. He was 91. There was a sense of loss. A sense of loosingsomeone I knew. As a foreigner who lived in Singapore and now as someone who doesn’t even live in Singapore anymore, I felt I had lost someone who mattered to me.
Such is the impact of his vision and action that sitting in South Africa I am thinking of Singapore, mentally joining the thousands of people queuing up for hours to pay their last respects to him.
