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Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, an achievement or a failed experiment.
Anyone coming to Singapore island for the first time would be no doubt impressed. Resplendent with high rise towers, glass monuments sparkling in the burning sun, litter free streets and free running motor traffic unlike the congestions of Bangkok or Manila. One cannot be blamed for thinking, great achievement, miracle of the century.
Anyone can put up window dressing but what matters surely is what is in there. I am told even the capital city of the repressive North Korea Pyongyang is also similar. But we all know what North Korea really is and what it is not.
In my reckoning, Lee Kuan Yew is a total failure. If he has been successful, it has only been to pay himself, his family and his cronies and sycophants $3.7 million dollars a year of salary and to siphon off even more untold sums of state money.
As for Singapore, the following is what he has created. Is this success or something else?
As to how much Singaporeans disapprove of their own country, this fact is illuminating. Today Singapore has a literally dying population with the lowest birth rate in the world, for an already tiny native island population of about 3 million, an alarming circumstance indeed.
In a few decades, at this rate, there won't be any more real native born Singaporeans left. The number of children born is insufficient even to replace the existing people.
The number of disaffected Singaporeans leaving the island for settlement abroad is mounting, as many as a thousand a year and climbing. Highly educated Singaporeans, the very ones Singapore needs the most, of all races continue to leave. The ones remaining are those incapable of leaving being unskilled and uneducated.
To overcome the population dearth, Lee Kuan Yew brings in unimaginably large numbers of foreigners to settle there. Many of them are given citizenship and the rest come for a duration and leave.
Singapore's population is now transient with most people there staying for temporary short stints. These are usually the lesser qualified ones who are either incapable of emigrating to the desired destinations of Australia Canada and the USA or are there to acquire skills which will enable them to emigrate later.
Within a few years with insufficient child birth and massive emigration, there will no longer be anymore native born Singaporeans in Singapore. They would consist entirely of foreigners, recent immigrants or recently naturalized Singaporeans.
These new transient citizens and residents would have no loyalty interest or passion for the island. Productivity and quality would drop island wide.
With the Singaporeans of today, living in fear of Lee Kuan Yew's draconian rule and the need to submit to his authority, he has created a uniform Singaporean, uniform in both mind and spirit.
This Singaporean has no opinion other than the universally accepted view. He has no opinion on the issue of fundamental rights which he has none. No opinion on the question of the rule of law, which there is none in the island. No opinion on the question of corruption among the Lee Kuan Yew family when they pay themselves millions of his tax payers money.
The Singaporean which Lee Kuan Yew created today is literally a zombie, an automaton. The former President of Singapore Devan Nair described them as "department store dummies". They are a species which will accept anything and have the courage to protest about nothing. What Lee Kuan Yew created is a weak ineffective effete half educated cowardly human being. This is not the sort of animal capable of achieving greatness.
He has created and effectively entrenched state sanctioned racial discrimination. Malays and Indians are not as favoured as the Chinese. They are not allowed to live wherever they want, a Malay cannot be an Air Force Officer and they are dissuaded from joining the civil service higher echelons. The police force on the other hand has a disproportionately large number of Malays because the better educated Chinese and Indians find the sort of work unpleasant and abhorrent such as arresting Lee Kuan Yew's political opponents.
PAP card carrying members are given preference over government contracts and business opportunities. Since all this dirty work is secretly done, as there is no free press, one cannot prove the nepotism, but we all can see that it is so.
The courts and law being routinely used to silence political dissent, the entire island has lost faith in the legal system. You cannot get justice if you are not connected to the Lee Kuan Yew family and if you are, then your victory is guaranteed. As a result the law is largely not resorted to by the citizenry, with the brand new latest technology law courts sitting as White Elephants, empty most of the time for lack of cases.
The number of lawyers there are just 3,000 for a population of 5 million, a number totally inadequate relative to population size. Singaporeans do not chose a career in the law which they see as discredited.
Lee Kuan Yew placed his son the Prime Minister whom no one respects and no one cares for. With Lee Kuan Yew's demise his son would very probably flee the island taking with him his entire set of compliant ministers and friends.
Building skyscrapers is simply not enough. What should have been done is to develop and nurture an intelligent thinking and independent minded proud people. Instead he has created dummies and zombies. This is not an achievement. It is a total failure which will disintegrate together with Lee Kuan Yew's coffin.
Gopalan Nair
39737 Paseo Padre Parkway, Suite A1
Fremont, CA 94538, USA
Tel: 510 657 6107
Fax: 510 657 6914
Email: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com
Blog: http://singaporedissident.blogspot.com/
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