Mr Lee overdoes the role of lone strongman

Press, 26 January 1988, Page 12

Mr Lee overdoes the role of lone strongman

The 6 Ecooomisf urges Singapore's leader to relax his authoritarian line

THE Singapore that Mr Lee Kuan Yew led to independence in 1965 was a run-down island whose racially divided people spoke four official languages, had a gross domestic product per head of SNZ7BS, and were not many years beyond a terrorist campaign that could have left them ruled by communists. For the next 20 years the economy grew by almost 8 per’ • cent a year. Singaporeans now have a G.D.P. per head above $NZ10,770, higher than New Zealand’s, which they enjoy in a clean and stable place where race riots and guerrillas are dim memories. Mr Lee, the only Prime Minister Singapore has had, has a lot to be proud of. His pride may, however, be turning into the sort that goes before some unpleasant and avoidable things. The evidence has been piling up for the past year that Mr Lee thinks the whip-crack of his well-informed authority is still the way to drive Singapore forward. His country’s success ought to be convincing him that a lot more political and civil freedom — including the freedom of even the less well-informed to make their own decisions — is what Singapore really needs.

The Prime Minister’s unwillingness to brook dissent has been most visible in the Government’s slaps at the foreign press. In just over a year it has restricted the circulation in Singapore of “Time,” the “Asian Wall Street Journal,” “Asia Week,” and most recently, the “Far Eastern Economic Review.” The absurd box in which this campaign has trapped the Government was illuminated by the bill it introduced in Parliament last week. Singapore’s ambition to be a regional business centre demands that the information in foreign publications be available, impertinent though Mr Lee often finds them.

So Singapore is creating a sort of official samizdat, the new bill will suspend the country’s copyright law to allow photocopied versions of restricted publications to be circulated in Singapore, though not for profit, when the real thing cannot. Journalists always complain. What then, of the attack on a cell of alleged Marxists bent, the Government says, bn over-throw-ing it? The arrests of 22 people, including several Roman Catholics whose main offence seems to have been confused thinking about economics, I were accom-

panied by a blitz of televised "documentaries” and confessions, but since they were detained without trial, by not a single independent test of the validity of the accusations. The conventional Opposition has got off no easier.

Alarmed by the fall in his share of the vote from 75 per cent in 1980 to 63 per cent in 1984 (when the Opposition captured two of Parliament’s 79seats), Mr Lee’s Government proposed a constitutional amendment last month that will replace single-member constituencies with multi-member ones. A way of ensuring representation of racial minorities, it explains. It is also likely to ensure that not a single Opposition member is returned in the next election.

Mr Lee, perhaps because he is a genuinely far-seeing man, has always had an authoritarian touch. But Singapore is not the sad place it was when the Prime Minister began confidently calling all the shots in the mid-19605. Singaporeans are not only richer: they are better-educated, better-travelled, mostly fluent in English, less prey to strong racial feeling. The Government has recognised in its privatisation and financial-liberalisation programmes that Singaporeans need

more economic elbow-room for their growth, but it wants their social and political behaviour to remain swaddled.

The argument is often made, rightly, that sooner or later this stifles the creativity that allows rich countries to become even richer. There is more to it than that. Political and civil liberties are a good in themselves, which people tend to want more of.

This seems to be an even harder proposition for Mr Lee to accept than it has been for many other Asian authoritarians, from Manila to Seoul, who have had it

forced on them over the past two years. He has overmastered Singapore’s politics for so long that there is no effective counterweight to his intellect and personality.

But one man’s decisions, however brilliant he is, cannot in the end predict the future more accurately than the collective decisions of a countryful of not all that much duller people making their own individual choices.

Mr Lee has spent most of the past quarter-century being right. Now he is wrong; Copyright — The Economist