Lee Kuan Yew reflects on Singapore’s governance (2006)

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew reflects on Singapore’s governance

September 15, 2006




Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew today spoke about the importance of recruiting the best talent to form a pillar to support Singapore’s system of governance.

He made this point in a speech at the Raffles Forum where he recounted lessons of governance learnt during his years of leadership in Singapore’s pre and post independence years.

MM: Our problem now, and it’s been a problem right from the very beginning, is how to find a way get people who are successful in their professions and jobs to come into politics and to sit out from the Opposition and in time take over. The PAP in every election scours the whole community, and we’re a small country with three plus million, with the help of a computer, we know who are the best lawyers, doctors, dentists and businessmen, and we see them, persuade them, and we get a broad spectrum of the very best to lead the government. And supporting them are activists at various levels, because you can’t just run the government with CEOs or political CEOs.

Minister Mentor Lee was joined by Professor Lawrence Summers from Harvard University in the forum chaired by Mr. Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Professor Summers posed a question to Minister Mentor on the continuance of governance by the People’s Action Party in Singapore.

LS: If we could all come back forty years from now and look at Singapore forty years from now and we saw that the PAP had continued in power for forty years and there had been no interruption because the Opposition had never prevailed, would that be something that is good? A sign that the PAP continued to supply the best candidates and they had continued to be elected. Or would that be a sign that a necessary kind of transition, after all the LDP had stopped leading Japan and the PRI had stopped leading Mexico. Would you be disappointed if you came back forty years from now and the where with all to have transitions had not taken place?

Mr. Lee replied.

MM: I cannot say what will happen forty years from now because I can’t even say what will happen in the next ten years. My hope is that there will be a government that is as equal to the job as the PAP was. That is my hope. We have structured the system such that a competent group that comes in will find a machine that works, don’t tinker with it, run the system properly on the basis of merit, not nepotism, and you will always find a way out of the problem. My ambition is not to preserve the PAP. My ambition having created this Singapore is to preserve the system that produces the answers that we must have as a society to survive.

Professor Summers also spoke about governance within the United States and the need for checks and balances despite bureaucracy.

LS: I think I would not trade the problems that the US officials face for the problems that leaders of any other country face and in that sense the United States is a profoundly successful society. I had a conversation once that really changed my perspective on these matters. I was trying to get the United States to do what was obviously in its interest and the world’s interest in making contributions to one of world’s international organizations. It was overwhelmingly in the US interest to make and for reasons that were highly political and petty, it didn’t look like Congress was going to do what I was asking. So we were there and I was commenting to a friend that it was so hard, I had to get it through Congress and such, while in other countries when they decided to do it, they do it. Here, it’s the Congress on this and that. And my friend said that “Yes, it’s terrible Larry. On the other hand, there was a proposal from your administration to completely transform the healthcare system in ways that were very likely not to have worked. And that Congress saved you and saved the country from that healthcare plan. And maybe that very slugginess that comes from these checks and balances, and to which you find so inconvenient have some very powerful advantages.

That was Professor Lawrence Summers from Harvard University speaking at the Raffles Forum.