Lee Kuan Yew's ego trip on Singapore

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Singapore's state controlled newspaper, Straits Times of August 11, 2013 has the story "Lee Kuan Yew on fate of Singapore in 100 years time". In it, the paper reports that in a recent book he had written, he is unsure whether Singapore would exist in a 100 years time although he believes other countries like USA and Australia will. Please see the report http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/singapore/story/lee-kuan-yew-fate-singapore-100-years-time-20130811

A lot of the article is pure and unadulterated self praise, an ego trip, to take credit for what the island is today, although a deeper examination by an erudite student would indeed show Singapore, despite it's high rise buildings which by the way is used by many of his citizens to jump from and commit suicide, to be no more than a failure than any real success.

The article says "People like Mr Ow-Yeong have seen Singapore develop from the unsettling 1960s, when hardship and poverty were still the rule rather than the exception, to today's vibrant and cosmopolitan Singapore, providing well-paying jobs to a highly educated population."

But he fails to mention that not just Singapore but many other countries, even much larger ones with much larger populations have also achieved equally great success.

Furthermore other countries are not like a small tiny island like Singapore is. They have to contend with millions of people across large land areas and they, unlike Lee and his tiny island, cannot change overnight with a flick of a finger.

Governing Singapore is the easiest job in the world for Lee. All you do is to silence everyone with Kangaroo court justice, bring in a few foreign investors and bingo, you have a functioning country. Singapore is not India or China with hundreds of millions of people over a large land mass . Both the Chinese and the Indians in rural areas are having it hard. But hopefully they are moving ahead too. You can't change India overnight with a flick of a finger like Lee Kuan Yew in his tiny island inhabited by an obedient and subservient people can.

As for "today's vibrant and cosmopolitan Singapore providing well paying jobs to highly educated population" he has conveniently left out the details which are not so flattering.

As for well paying jobs, they only go to Lee Kuan Yew's sycophants and bootlickers who sing praises and prop up the dictatorship. K Shanmugam his Tamil Minister for Law has a well paying job. His job primarily is to prostrate daily before his Chinese master, and pass legislation to deny Singaporeans even a single human right. Thanks to him, the island has no free speech or expression and even a single man peacefully protesting can be locked up in jail.

As for an education, Singaporeans cannot be said to be educated. They are merely literate, because an educated man would not be willing to live under this dictatorship.

And don't forget, most people merely earn enough to survive and don't even have a car, while the wealthy  drive around in their brand new Lamborghini. Singapore has the largest income gap  in the world.

You can read the rest of the article yourself. It is just one long litany of self praise and braggadocio. But a careful examination of Singapore shows that he had not developed it. On the contrary he has destroyed it.

Merely building skyscrapers, roads and communication systems will not ensure success if you don't have the right type of people to run the island.

After having locked up, threatened and bankrupted anyone with views opposite to him, almost the entire generation of educated thinking people who would have stayed behind to lead Singapore have all left the island in disgust.

They are all settled today in Australia and elsewhere. Fearing any intelligent thinking people as a possible threat to him and his selfish desire to remain in power, he has made sure that anyone who uttered any contrarian view was silenced and destroyed.

Most left and those remaining in the island live quiet obscure lives. Their wisdom is wasted for Singapore. On the whole they are not leadership quality. A leader would have stayed and fought for freedom. If not, he would have cleared out and refused to live in a dictatorship.

This leaves the vast majority of people in the island who by and large are a cowardly, spineless and indifferent lot. As they are afraid to question authority, they live their lives under Lee Kuan Yew as a mindless conformist going about their jobs and waiting for Lee to tell them what to do next.

By Lee Kuan Yew ensuring that everyone who remains is just a mere obedient follower he has the left Singapore very unstable without any real foundation for continuity. In such a situation, you always need to have some leader to come along so that these blind voiceless timid Singaporeans can rally around and obey their new master.

But moving from one master to another master which Singapore has no choice but to do, thanks to Lee Kuan Yew's selfish motives to keep the islanders politically ignorant, is a very dangerous thing.

The island has no template, no backdrop upon which to rely as other countries because it does not have a Constitution in reality. Lee has successfully managed to criminalize every single human right in the Constitution. Without a constitution, it is like a ship sailing in uncharted waters without a compass or sextant.

Singapore's future, thanks to Lee Kuan Yew will be like the blind leading the blind. After 92 year old Lee Kuan Yew dies, which by his own admission is going to happen very soon, no one knows in an island without any rule of law or political doctrine, what will the new leader expect Singaporeans to do. The future, thanks to Lee Kuan Yew's thoroughly misguided policy of intimidating everyone is one big mystery and only time will tell.

And he has conveniently left out the fact that the numbers emigrating to the West from an already tiny native born population of just 2 million or less is increasing at a break neck speed. Those who can afford to leave are leaving as fast as they can. They know that with his demise, there is bound to be island wide uncertainty, a very possible stock market collapse and the Singapore dollar possibly being worthless. The citizens CPF monies being held by the government would probably be lost.

If there are immigrants coming in, they are mostly from Communist China who are useless as immigrants, most of them not knowing even English. This is further going to cause the economy to collapse even further and the island would be nothing thanks to his selfish desire to keep his grip on the power, his corrupt desire to steal as much as he can and to keep anyone with any ability silent.

And he goes on this self praise by saying that it is because he permits his ministers to be corrupt by paying themselves millions of dollars, which is why the Singapore streets are clean, no corruption and low crime rates. This is a blatant lie.

You can go to any other modern city in the world and they too are clean if not cleaner. Have you see San Francisco, Madrid, Barcelona or even Kuala Lumpur. Singapore is not any cleaner than them but the ministers there don't corruptly pay themselves $3.7 million a year.

Low crime rates? Really? Then how do you explain the innumerable daily reports of particularly violent gruesome crime daily in the newspapers, such as loan shark attacks, gang attacks slashing necks and throats with knives, HDB elevator attacks and murders.

At this rate of violence, in a small tiny island with a tiny population, I would prefer living in the West side of Oakland California, known for it's violence anytime, than in so called safe Singapore. And then he says there is no corruption! What do you call paying yourself $3.7 million a year? Isn't that corruption?

I am sorry to tell Lee Kuan Yew that he is being too optimistic to say that Singapore will be fine for the next 10 to 15 years. If 92 year old Lee Kuan Yew were to die this year since he has said he doesn't want to hang around too long, Singapore will collapse within just 5 years. I am prepared to take a bet on that.

Gopalan Nair
Attorney at Law
A Singaporean in exile
Fremont, California, USA
Tel: 510 491 4375
EMail: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com