LKY: THE MAN AND HIS POLICIES

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Of late, a number of people have come out to defend Lee Kuan Yew and remind Singaporeans how he has brought Singapore from third world to first and has given us clean water and fresh air.

Let’s give credit where credit is due.

When PAP came into power, Singapore was an under developed colonial outpost with no natural resources. Its port however, was already doing roaring business due to its strategic location and the deep and sheltered waters of Keppel. Lee Kuan Yew has a role to play in developing Singapore into the first Asian Tiger (there are now four: South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore). Hailed as the founding father of Singapore, Lee did not achieve Singapore’s economic success alone. The same way a man can never become a father by himself, Lee was partnered by a team of very able, dedicated and intelligent men like Toh Chin Chye, Ong Pang Boon, Goh Keng Swee, K.M. Byrne, Ong Eng Guan, Tan Kia Gan, Ahmad Ibrahim, Yong Nyuk Lin and S. Rajaratnam.

Instead, some policies authored by Lee have become the fracture of the Singapore society today.

High Ministerial Salaries

Lee believed that ministers should be well paid in order to maintain a clean and honest government. In 1994, he proposed to link the salaries of ministers, judges, and top civil servants to the salaries of top professionals in the private sector, arguing that this would help recruit and retain talent to serve in the public sector.

Today, we have the highest paid Ministers with very questionable achievements on KPIs and sadly, our top echelons have proven that high salaries does not equate corruption-free.

Stop-At-2 Policy

In the late 1960s, fearing that Singapore’s growing population might overburden the developing economy, Lee started a vigorous Stop at Two family planning campaign. Couples were urged to undergo sterilisation after their second child. Third and subsequent children were given lower priorities in education and such families received fewer economic rebates. For many couples, sterilisation was a gross violation of their rights to personal choice but the imposed disadvantages on their children were enough to make these couple toe the policy line and submit to the draconian demands of Lee.

Today, Singaporeans are told the government needs to import foreigners by the millions in order to replace an aging work force.

Graduate Marry Graduate

In 1983, Lee sparked the ‘Great Marriage Debate’ when he encouraged Singapore men to choose highly-educated women as wives. He was concerned that a large number of graduate women were unmarried. A match-making agency Social Development Unit (SDU) was set up to promote socialising among men and women graduates.

Graduate Mother Scheme

In the Graduate Mothers Scheme, Lee introduced incentives such as tax rebates, schooling, and housing priorities for graduate mothers who had three or four children, in a reversal of the over-successful ‘Stop-at-Two’ family planning campaign in the 1960s and 1970s.

By the late 1990s, the birth rate had fallen so low that Lee’s successor Goh Chok Tong extended these incentives to all married women, and gave even more incentives, such as the ‘baby bonus’ scheme.

Corporal Punishment

Lee’s government inherited judicial corporal punishment from British rule, but greatly expanded its scope. Under the British, it had been used as a penalty for offences involving personal violence, amounting to a handful of caning sentences per year. The PAP government under Lee extended its use to an ever-expanding range of crimes. By 1993 it was mandatory for 42 offences and optional for a further 42. Those routinely ordered by the courts to be caned now include drug addicts and illegal immigrants. From 602 canings in 1987, the figure rose to 3,244 in 1993 and to 6,404 in 2007.

School corporal punishment (for male students only) was likewise inherited from the British, and this is in widespread use to discipline disobedient schoolboys, still under 1957 legislation. Lee also introduced caning in the Singapore Armed Forces. Today, Singapore is one of the few countries in the world where corporal punishment is an official penalty in military discipline.

Compulsory Conscription

Lee introduced conscription whereby all abled-bodied male Singaporean citizens age 18 and above are required to serve National Service (NS) either in the Singapore Armed Forces, Singapore Police Force or the Singapore Civil Defence. He asked Goh Keng Swee to build up the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) and requested help from other countries, particularly Israel, for advice, training and facilities.

Today, Singaporean males find themselves being side-lined for jobs because of the NS and reservist obligations. Employers prefer to employ foreigners who do not have the same commitment that takes them away from their jobs for several weeks a year.

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