This change did not occur naturally: It was man-made. Indeed, almost everything distinctive about Singapore is man-made: the ethical probity of its governance; the efficiency of its public administration; the global reach of its private sector; the astonishing capacity of its ethnically-heterogeneous and largely-immigrant population to live in peace; and, supremely, the uncanny ability of its armed forces and intelligence services to provide a credible deterrent against invasion and occupation. The man who was ultimately behind the making of contemporary Singapore was Lee Kuan Yew.
When he rose like a comet in the political sky in the 1950s, he was Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. When he died in 2015, he left behind Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. It was a country like no other.
To observe the centenary of his birth this year (in September) is to commemorate the memory of a man of whom it might be said that the legacy he left behind was no less than a country itself. This is not to indulge in idle flattery, because he detested false praise almost as much as he was neuralgic in his intolerance of opposition and dissidence, including in the media. To say that he moulded Singapore in his image is no more than to acknowledge that a tiny island city-state, crime-ridden and vice-infested even during its economic heyday as a colonial metropolis, was transformed into a developmental model after independence.
