By Devadas Krishnadas

 “You have got to believe in something. You are not just building houses in order that people can procreate and fill these houses up because there is no point in that. You do these things because in the end your create a happy and healthy nation, a society in which man finds fulfilment and you have got to have the ideological basis…Nations have gone through tremendous privations and hardships in order to achieve specific goals which have inspired and fired their imagination”. These are powerful and stirring words were from a leader on the cusp of taking responsibility of a small nation with a rocky past, a bleak present and a very uncertain future. Mr Lee Kuan Yew was speaking at a press conference in March 1965, a mere four months before Singapore acquired sovereignty.

What Lee Kuan Yew was saying was that simple survival or mechanistic actions to fulfil policy plans were insufficient both to underpin the concept of nationhood or as validation of good leadership. Good leaders needed to be thinkers as well as doers. They needed to have the ideas to match the challenges before the nation, be able to articulate them persuasively to the populace and translate them into effective policy action. This was not a view he held alone. It was a perspective shared and personified by the leading lights of first generation of leaders of the Political Action Party (PAP) – in particular Mr S Rajaratnam and Mr Goh Keng Swee. In this essay, I take a closer look at the quality of leadership of these political pioneers and search for meaning which continues to have application to the question of national leadership today and tomorrow.

Prima Inter Pares – The First Amongst Equals

Mr Lee Kuan Yew received his political education in practical terms through his experiences during World War Two as he watched the collapse of the British Empire in the Far East and with it myth of the supremacy of the British. He watched as the constituents of the lost South-East Asian Empire territories paid an appalling cost during the Japanese occupation.. He proceeded to study law at the London School of Economics and then at Cambridge. While at the London School of Economics he encountered the socialist theorist, Harold Laski and discovered for himself how communists had infiltrated socialist student organisation.

In the period following his return he worked towards decolonisation. What is remarkable as contrast to the subsequent generations of People’s Action Party (PAP) leaders, at least until recently is the frequency and range of his emphasis on engaging the population with his energy and ideas. Some explain it away with the simplistic canard that this was typical of the days before the internet. This, I think, profoundly misreads the nature and significance of the quality of leadership which Lee and his compatriots brought to the scene and which ultimately underpinned their political success. In spearheading the championing of their presence to the populace, Lee led from the front – with interviews, speeches and rallies.

The Ideas Man

S. Rajaratnam had to gone to England before the war to study but never completed his University education. He assuredly would have failed to even be granted an interview for civil service appointment let alone be eligible for the vaunted Administrative Service. Yet, this was the man who crystallised the ‘ideological basis’ which have so fired the imagination of three generations of Singaporeans and he did it in 38 words in the form of the national pledge – We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion, to build a democratic society based on justice and equality so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation. Four years ago then then Nominated Member of Parliament Viswa Sadasivan called for the national pledge as the moral compass, specifically he called for the pledge to be source of reference and inspiration when Parliament debates national policies, “especially economic policies”. At the time, his address was not well received in Parliament. It is therefore a delicious irony that in the wake of the 2011 General Election, with the PAP reeling from the loss of Aljunied Group Representative Constituency (GRC) and with it two Cabinet Ministers, that the opening speakers at the subsequent National Day Rally – Heng Swee Kiat, Lawrence Wong and Halimah Yacob – all championed the pledge as the uniting theme for Singapore.

Mr Sadasivan’s speech is well worth a relook.  [it can be seen and heard on Youtube with the text available online at Hansard] I would hazard that Mr Rajaratnam would have found much with which to agree. In 1957, Mr Rajaratam delivered a 6-part radio address over Radio Malaya to espouse to the wider country on his ideas of nationhood – in the course of this series, he created a character he called the ‘Optimist’ through which he asked his mass audience, “Don’t you agree that a leader is the sort of man who can inspire people for a cause – appeal to the best in people?.”

The Numbers Man

Dr Goh Keng Swee was an economist by training. He too had studied in England, earning a doctorate before returning home to find common cause with Lee and Rajaratnam. When working on fiscal policy whilst at the Ministry of Finance, I took the opportunity to school myself in the writing of Dr Goh, justifiably considered the father of our economic success in the first two decades of sovereignty. What I found was remarkable – Dr Goh did not so much deliver budget addresses but verbal essays on the meaning and purpose of his economic plans. They were also the epitome of plain speaking. Witness the title of one of his first budget speeches – “This is How Your Money is Spent” (Budget Statement to the Legislative Assembly, 1960) He found the time to personally prepare supplementary essays to companion his budget speeches as well as publish several books, such as The Economics of Modernisation and The Practice of Economic Growth, which articulated his economic thinking in full detail.

At a time when educational levels were a shadow of what they are today, Dr Goh took as his audience not only the expert but also the layman. His approach was not to dumb down his message but to lift up his audience to the required level of understanding to appreciate both the complex challenges but also the complications of policy. While he actively recruiting talented Singaporeans to serve in public service Dr Goh was adamant that the first and foremost beneficiary of growth must be the common man. In 1967 he was interviewed for a Straits Times article entitled “Stop Behaving like Computers, Goh Tells the ‘Egg-Heads’”.  He admonished that, “If the intelligentsia want to make a contribution to society, they must first understand what kind of society they live in. By society, of course, I do not mean the high society of snobs and socialites, but the people at the grass-root level: how they live, how they work, what they do in their leisure time, what they think of the world, their hopes, their fears and aspirations…because the intelligentsia are puzzled over the nature of the society they live in, such views as they express from time to time relate to abstract principles in vacuo”

Lessons in Political Leadership

There are 5 qualities which are common amongst these great leaders and which together, gave the PAP both the ability and the will to prevail in the difficult years of the 1960s.

First, they served a higher cause. These men were on a mission. There was little in the way of a roadmap or a chorus of support for their efforts. They fought for something larger than themselves – they fought for the idea of a nation and then set about making it happen. Their achievement was to get enough others to believe in their cause to make a going of it.

Second, they served their cause with conviction. All these men were men of conviction. They deeply believed in what they were doing and put their reputations and their very lives on the line. This conviction communicates itself intuitively. Anyone watching, listening or even simply reading the text of rally and stump speeches can feel the energy and sincerity of their beliefs reaching out across the arc of time. These were charismatic men, each in their own way, was fascinating to observe and to engage.

Third, these men had courage – moral, physical and political courage. They ran the danger of challenging both the colonial authorities as well as the ruthless Malayan Communist Party. They did not flinch from their stand but pressed home their position with ever greater intensity.

Fouth, these men put into effect praxis. Praxis is the putting of ideas into action. Lee, Rajaratman and Dr Goh were not merely pragmatists, they firstly men of ideas. A review of their writing and pronouncements in the critical period of 1950s-1970s will show clearly that they thought deeply about the condition on Man, the role of the State and developed political principles to guide their policy action. And they were far from shy with their ideas – indeed, the first political battle fronts were ones of ideas to be followed only later by campaigns of execution.

Fifth, these pioneers kept their focus on the interest of the people. The object of their political will and their policy energy was to improve the lot of the masses. Things extraneous to that focus were avoided. The fruits of this concentration of effort can be seen today. Alongside their genuine concern for the common man, in the tentative times of the 1960s, they were also alive to the political reality that wavering from this focus would have been a short cut to their political obsolescence.

Wither To Now?

In September 2012, Minister Lawrence Wong commented in a facebook post that “The PAP has done a lot for Singaporeans over the past decades. But it is not perfect – no party is. We need to listen to criticisms and improve as a party, to serve our people even better. This is why I and many others joined the PAP – because we appreciate what the party has done, we believe in the cause the party stands for, and we want to help the party do more to serve the interests of Singapore and our fellow Singaporeans. Look at what we have achieved together over the years. Our public housing, our schools and institutions of higher learning, our parks and museums, our container port and airport, and even the Pledge – these are national institutions that the PAP government has worked hard to put in place, with the support and contributions of all Singaporeans.

In the increasingly fraught politics of Singapore there is significant cognitive dissonance between a general claim on the loyalty of the people by current leaders on the basis of past actions by preceding generations of political leaders, albeit from the same party, and current expectations and future aspirations of the people. It is not enough to merely invoke the charm of reputations and policies of past leaders.

The shared and individual qualities of Lee, Rajaratnam and Dr Goh are no longer the exclusive domain of the PAP – rather they have become the national standard by which the citizenry measure their political leaders. The party whose leaders can embody the qualities of political leadership of pioneering trio and build a new architecture of ideas for the future which fires the imagination of the people, has, and deserves, the best shot at becoming the government of the future.

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Devadas Krishnadas is the Founder and Director of Future-Moves