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From leader to mentor

By the time Mr Lee Kuan Yew had stepped down as Prime Minister in November 1990, Singapore was well on its way to the club of First World nations. But his work for Singapore did not stop here.

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By the time Mr Lee Kuan Yew had stepped down as Prime Minister in November 1990, Singapore was well on its way to the club of First World nations. But his work for Singapore did not stop here.

Remaining in Cabinet until after the May 2011 General Election — first as Senior Minister and then as Minister Mentor from 2004 — Mr Lee threw his support behind his younger Cabinet colleagues, whether in decision-making or the election fray, focused his attention on specific key challenges including the country’s younger generation, and continued making his presence felt in Parliament where he thundered about policies he insisted were right for Singapore.

No less could be expected from the man who famously said in 1988: “And even from my sickbed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel that something is going wrong … I’ll get up.”

HIS ROLE IN CABINET

One of his first tasks was to consolidate the position of his successor, Mr Goh Chok Tong, and work out with him the areas in which he could best contribute.

Said Education Minister Mr Heng Swee Keat, who served as Mr Lee’s Principal Private Secretary in the late 1990s: “As Senior Minister, he devoted much of his effort to helping PM Goh succeed. He refrained from visiting Indonesia and Malaysia as he wanted PM Goh to establish himself as our leader. Instead, he fanned out to China, US and Europe to convince leaders and investors that PM Goh’s leadership would take Singapore on to new levels of success.”

Mr Goh said: “I found that he was a very good teacher because he wanted the younger ministers to succeed … We built up a comfortable relationship and when I became Prime Minister, of course he was very good, he gave me all the respect which he should give to a Prime Minister.”

Freed from the pressures of daily decision-making, Mr Lee said he was able to “reflect on the bigger and longer-term issues and contribute towards more rounded solutions”.

One key instance was during the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, when he looked to position Singapore’s financial system for the future, discussing with and seeking Mr Goh’s approval for a broad plan to revamp it in a calibrated manner.

Within Cabinet, Mr Lee saw himself playing the role of a guardian or a tutorial master to the younger team running Singapore; His job was to warn of “side-tracks” and possible mistakes when they were making decisions. Said Mr Lee in a 1998 book interview: “I can’t tell them what to do as their great achievements, their great breakthroughs. That’s for them to work out with younger Singaporeans. But I know that certain things are sure paths to trouble, so avoid them.”

Mr Goh said: “He had a lot of historical experience, he had more time to read and he would share his wisdom and insights. That was the principal value of having him among us in the Cabinet meetings. If we had kept him upstairs … the younger ones, especially, would have lost out on a lot.”

YOUNGER SINGAPOREANS

Mr Lee’s concerns were also with the younger generation of Singaporeans in general — that they did not know where Singapore came from, and did not understand the real challenges and imperatives for Singapore’s survival ahead.

And so he began penning his two-volume memoirs, which were published in 1999 as The Singapore Story and From Third World To First, “for a younger generation of Singaporeans who took stability, growth and prosperity for granted”.

A series of other books followed, in which he sought to preserve and communicate his experiences and insights for future generations.

In the foreword to Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going, Mr Lee warned: “If you think I am just playing a broken record, you may live to regret it. I have lived through many economic and political crises in the region and the world. These have crystallised some fundamental truths for me that we forget or ignore at our peril.”

He spent time meeting groups of young Singaporeans. In 2006, for example, as Minister Mentor, he engaged them in an hour-long televised forum on Channel NewsAsia prior to the General Election.

“Why am I talking to you? Because I think it is necessary for people like you and your generation to understand that this is not a business of just voting or not voting. Politics has got to do with your life, your job, you home, your medicare, your children’s future,” he said, reminding them: “Without good government, we will rapidly go down.”

A number of trends worried Mr Lee: That Singapore might have come to mean a “hotel” to a young generation without abiding loyalties. That parenthood was losing traction among them (Singapore would “fold up” if citizens didn’t reproduce, he warned). That they were showing a declining proficiency in Mandarin (spurring him to produce two books on his lifelong challenge in learning Mandarin and Singapore’s bilingual journey). That younger Singaporeans had become “less hard-driving and hard-striving”, compared with “hungry” immigrants.

To support social mobility through education, his donations made possible various Lee Kuan Yew awards, including for all-round excellence and the Lee Kuan Yew Scholarship to Encourage Upgrading for outstanding Institute of Technical Education and polytechnic graduates.

HIS STAND ON POLICIES

On matters vital to the country, Mr Lee continued to take a very direct interest. For instance, on water security before the completion of the first NEWater plant in 2002, he said: “I stayed focussed on safeguarding our water supply until NEWater. Even when I wasn’t prime minister, I insisted, every month, on a full report: What is the progress? Nobody knew the situation about water better than I did.”

In Parliament, Mr Lee continued to speak up with passion to defend or champion controversial policies he believed were fundamental to Singapore’s continued success.

One example was his proposal in the 1990s to peg the pay of ministers to the private sector, which generated plenty of debate inside and outside Parliament over the years.

In 2007, with public furore over ministerial pay hikes, Mr Lee shot back: “You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you’ll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again ... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers’ jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people’s countries, foreign workers. I cannot have that!”

In 2010, when Nominated Member of Parliament Viswa Sadasivan called for equal treatment for all races in Parliament, Mr Lee rose to “bring the House back to earth” on the realities of racial equality in Singapore.

However, he also pragmatically acknowledged the winds of change, and in 2005, when Singapore debated whether to have integrated resorts, Mr Lee, who had long staunchly opposed casinos, indicated the Government’s change of heart when he said Singapore would be left behind by its neighbours if it did not have a casino.

After retiring from Cabinet in 2011, Mr Lee acknowledged that, being out of Government, he was less well informed of what was happening and the pressures for change in the country.

“I therefore go by the decisions of the ministers, by and large. I seldom express a contrary opinion — at least, much less than when I was in Government and attended Cabinet meetings, which allowed me to participate fully in the debates. Occasionally, when I disagree strongly with something, I make my views known to the Prime Minister.”

One such instance came when the Government was looking to reintroduce Chinese dialect programmes on free-to-air channels. Mr Lee objected, pointing out that, as Prime Minister, he had “paid a heavy price” — antagonising an entire generation of Chinese — for getting dialect programmes suppressed and encouraging people to speak Mandarin.

“Why should I allow Cantonese or Hokkien to infect the next generation?” he argued. “It will creep back, slowly but surely.”

STILL THE FIGHTER

Mr Lee remained ever the politician-streetfighter who had cut his teeth in the hurly-burly of the 1950s and 1960s, courting the unions and hammering down on opponents.

Over the two decades as leader, he launched a series of defamation suits against Opposition leaders JB Jeyaretnam, Tang Liang Hong and Chee Soon Juan, and his sister Siok Chin, in the latter case taking to the stand in 2008 to be cross-examined.

He continued to take an interest in the tripartite relationship, as Senior Minister encouraging promising returned scholars to take up full-time carers in the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), as union leaders who rose through the ranks became few and far between. He also urged NTUC to get Members of Parliament to work full-time with the unions.

But he also wielded the whip. In 2003, Mr Lee again stepped into the union-management dispute at Singapore Airlines — which had been a lynchpin of Singapore’s economic development — summoning union leaders from the Air Line Pilots Association-Singapore (Alpa-S) to the Istana to settle “old business”.

Just as he had warned them when he similarly summoned them in 1980, that “I will not let anyone do Singapore in”, so this time he said of the ringleaders: “If they play this game, there will be broken heads.”

At each General Election he plunged into the fray, and while his Tanjong Pagar GRC was never contested, he would hit the campaign trail to walk with the group and speak at key People’s Action Party (PAP) rallies in contested seats and in support of younger candidates. (Future office holders such as Ministers Khaw Boon Wan, Chan Chun Sing and Lui Tuck Yew also began their political careers under his wing in Tanjong Pagar.)

In 2006, in a typically hard-hitting rally speech for instance, he accused Workers’ Party (WP) candidate James Gomez of being “a liar” and his party chief of trying to cover up for him — daring the WP to sue the Government if what was said was untrue. The matter involved Mr Gomez disputing that he had not submitted his minority-race candidate application on Nomination Day.

At the next General Election, his penchant for blunt speaking stirred up unhappiness, months after another storm was created by the publication of his books Hard Truths, with his comments on Muslim integration. At the 2011 hustings, Mr Lee told the press that Aljunied voters would have “five years to live and repent” if they voted for the WP team.

Ultimately, with unhappiness over rising home prices and the foreigner influx, the PAP lost the constituency as well as six percentage points of the overall vote.

A week after the results, on May 14, Mr Lee and Mr Goh Chok Tong stepped down. In a joint statement, they said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his team “should have a fresh clean slate”.

“The time has come for a younger generation to carry Singapore forward in a more difficult and complex situation,” they said.

“After a watershed General Election, we have decided to leave the Cabinet and have a completely younger team of ministers to connect to and engage with this young generation.”

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