Singapore's best kept secret. Is Lee Kuan Yew still breathing

Ladies and Gentlemen,

For a country that has boasted daily for the last 50 years of their Lee Kuan Yew, the miracle man, who had done Singapore single handedly everything it is now, appears suddenly to be eerily silent on the subject.

Had not the 92 year old man recently written a book in which he confessed that "he is weakening daily" and that "no matter how much exercise he takes, it does him no good" and that if bedridden and turned into a cabbage, he "would rather die quickly" and had not the international media picked up on it, we would never have known that he in fact already has one foot firmly in his grave, and by all reckoning, it is only matter of days for the end.

But you notice that for such an important personage, made larger than life by his state propaganda team during the last 50 years while he has been perfecting his one party state no-nonsense, you-listen-to-me- or- else Stalinist police state plus the skyscrapers, it is surprising all of a sudden for them to be so quiet.

They are suddenly behaving as if Lee's health was the number one state secret. Except for one report which they were compelled to write since the foreign press had already broken the story, there has been nothing at all about how the old man is faring, especially since it has already been reported that he is in no less than a dying state. 

Why the need to keep Lee's state of health secret?

I reckon, Lee's minions at the top are now no longer confident that their island with no more than 2 million local born citizens, with the lowest birth rate and the highest brain drain in the world, will outlast the superman who will soon die.

Perhaps they are not very sure whether the island will now smoothly rally around his son and carry on as if this were normal.

Perhaps Singaporeans who look at his son only as the son of the father with no other redeeming qualities will evict him from his palace which his father gave him.

Perhaps Teo Chee Hean the half sleepy looking deputy to the son, whose qualifications are successfully passing his exams in school, and an expert in licking the asses of both father and son, may no longer be acceptable to Singaporeans upon his master's demise.

Perhaps they will look upon the Tamil Minister for Law K Shanmugam good enough only for tossing Indian pancakes in Singapore's Little India after the departure of his master, we will never know either.

I think a creeping crippling fear has come upon the entire bunch of scholar bootlickers and minions who form Lee's government, that they are now genuinely afraid whether the entire island will descend into another Dubai during the recent economic depression with banks leaving, money outflowing and persons leaving in a mass exodus over the uncertainly which will certainly loom over the future of the island, upon Lee's death, one does not know.

In fact I think they are not sure if the island will in effect literally disintegrate, unravel and collapse entirely.

Which is why I think it is important to put forward a confident face and not look nervous before the world, or they may give the cat away. Which is why they behave as if everything is fine in their house of cards as the Sun rises in the East in their island every morning.

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