What Filipinos must learn from Lee Kuan Yew

Whenever I land in Changi Airport, I ask myself what it would take to turn every Philippine city into Singapore. Every overseas Filipino worker who has passed through that magnificent airport sighs at the thought.

Lee Kuan Yew highlights that the “little red dot” catapulted itself from a village with no natural resources into Southeast Asia’s jewel in but a lifetime. Idealistic Filipinos must read Lee’s autobiography as a concrete lesson in the possible.

The story is prone to oversimplification or adulteration with myth. Critical young Singaporeans clarify that Singapore began not as a tiny fishing village but as a strategic British port. The Western media’s romanticization of a Switzerland of Asia is likewise too simplistic.

We should assess Lee through the eyes of OFWs who have lived in the Singapore two generations after him. The first and simplest lesson is that we must not compromise in the character we demand in our national leaders. Lee led an austere lifestyle though he was hardly poor, maintained a strict work ethic even in semiretirement, and backed his strong opinions with meticulous study.

Not that he was perfect. That his son leads Singapore today undercuts the meritocracy Lee espoused. Nor was he a paragon of tact. The best story I heard from the consummate diplomat Tommy Koh features Lee explaining the role of culture in national development. When a reporter asks if certain cultures retard development, Lee bluntly points to Caribbean countries’ supposed carnival culture. At the United Nations in New York, Koh wakes up to find every Caribbean ambassador angrily knocking on his door. He mollifies them by joking that at least his prime minister offends everyone equally. But such were Lee’s convictions that no one begrudged him the right to threaten to reach out from beyond the grave should Singapore go astray.

Second, Lee cultivated talent and cited the ability of his first ministers. Independent Singapore still had Malaysian troops stationed in it, so he wrote how he immediately put the most talented in charge of national defense. Technocratic to an extreme, an

older Lee presented statistics on the low marriage rate of female college graduates. He cajoled educated men to marry their peers to maintain the talent pool and introduced incentives for this, to howls of protest from educated women. Today, a special government agency still promotes dating among college graduates and, more seriously, the best students still aspire to serve in government.

Third, Lee was open to knowledge, absorbing what he considered appropriate for Singapore and avoiding other societies’ expensive mistakes. He invited Israelis to discreetly train the first Singapore army and later emphasized the United States’ key role in Asia’s security. He reinvented himself, moving from an Anglophilic Harry to the Kuan Yew that emphasized his Chinese heritage to the leader that pushed multiethnic Singaporeans to speak English to be competitive.

Singapore was initially conservative in financial regulation because Lee felt it could not yet bear the cost of a financial scandal. However, after retiring as prime minister, Lee was exposed to new concepts as an adviser to the multinational bank J.P. Morgan. He nudged his government in a more liberal direction and had his son head the financial regulator to implement this. He then nudged the Development Bank of Singapore to hire a retiring J.P. Morgan banker, pushing other Singapore banks to hire senior expats and adopt global practices.

Finally, Lee showed how critical vision is in leadership. We are fortunate to have a President perceived to be honest—yet reduced corruption or improved governance alone fall short of vision. Lee had a clear vision of a meritocratic market economy cushioned by healthcare subsidies and universal home ownership. He believed in the stability created when citizens own their homes. He laughed at how villagers hauled pigs and chickens up the stairs of the first high-rise government flats, but recalled with pride how homeowner citizens were ready to defend communities under threat of later riots. Lee also envisioned a racially integrated Singapore, enforced with both carrot and stick, and a clean, competent government supported by the willingness to pay higher salaries.

It is thus shallow to equate Lee with a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. What Lee criticized were weak democracies that left themselves directionless and, in the Philippines’ case, a soft people with short memories that too readily forgave past leaders’ worst sins. We can readily learn from Lee in the context of decisive action within our democratic traditions.

Although Philippine politics continues to revolve around personalities and emotional appeal, we do have young leaders with longer-term visions that transcend individual issues. Sen. Pia Cayetano has consistently championed women’s autonomy, which connects her passionate defense of reproductive health education on the very floor of the Supreme Court and her willingness to open the difficult debate on divorce. No one predicted that Sen. Sonny Angara would emerge as a tax reform advocate, highlighting how our income taxes are the region’s highest, or that Sen. Bam Aquino would be questioning our slow Internet speeds in a greater context of empowering startup businesses. Lacking a once-a-generation genius as Lee, we must throw our support behind transformative visions in various fields. Whether it takes 100 or 1,000 of our most forward-looking leaders to match a Lee, we will need them all to bring our 100 million people into modernity.

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