Monday 23 March 2015

LKY - political legacy

Image result for lee kuan yew quotesThe announcement of the death of 91 year old Founding Father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew came just as I was reading the narrated auto-biography of Fidel Castro.

And I mused that there are so many commonalities between the two poltical stalwarts as much as there are differences.

But one commonality stands above all else: their determination to fight corruption and make it a central policy creed of whatever they wanted to achieve.

The moral is that you can be a dictator or a democrat, you can believe in closed or open economies,  but as long as you truly fight corruption and show your people that you are not doing it for self-interest but for what you really believe in,  than people will stand beside you through thick and thin.

Obviously LKW had more poltical vision than FC and allowed his country to compete effectively in the globalisation process without forcing his subjects to live in a state of permanent revolution.

For that LKW has received plaudits from most world leaders quite untypical of when a founding father of a state as small as Singapore passes away.

There was a time when Singapore and Malta looked at each other as a benchmark but corruption got in the way of Malta's development and Singapore sprinted ahead of us.   So much ground to recover!