It's is important not just for voters to understand the role of a Singapore President, it is even more important for all aspiring candidates to have a crystal-clear understanding of the role of the President so that whoever is elected will act within the constitution.

Anyone who aspires to be involved in policy-making should seek a different platform. That platform is Parliament and the door to Parliament is the general election.

Is Dr Tan Cheng Bock confused?

Dr Tan Cheng Bock seems to be confused about the role of a President. He is making a second bid for President and wants to 'represent all Singaporeans'.

The President of Singapore is the HEAD OF STATE, NOT the representative of Singaporeans.

Is the President a politician? Is he in politics? Is he elected to represent Singaporeans to the Government? Is he the opposition in Parliament? No. No. No. No.

The opposition in Parliament is the Workers' Party. But it looks like many people have forgotten the existence of Workers' Party in Parliament.

The President is not a politician. He does not exist to oppose the government. He is not involved in government. He does not interfere in policy-making.

So what does the President do? Someone asks: Is his job just to wave his hand during each NDP? Of course not.

For want of a better word, we can say that the President is more like a diplomat. A politician represents his constituency for a term while a diplomat REPRESENTS THE NATION.

Thus you see President Tony Tan representing Singapore when the Queen invited him to London. He also receives dignitaries from other countries who come to Singapore and plays host to them and in the process help to further seal the good relations we have with the countries concerned. Just recently he received the former Swiss President Mr Adolf Ogi who led a delegation of Swiss business representatives to explore investment opportunities in this part of the world. (See here: https://www.facebook.com/DrTonyTan/posts/1099966273358225)

But the President is more than a diplomat.

While the role of the President is largely ceremonial, the President is also bestowed with custodial power to ensure the integrity of our key institutions (which include the Auditor-General Office and Attorney-General's Chambers, CPIB etc). He also holds the second key to our reserves and ensures that no rogue government can help itself freely to the reserves.

In addition, President Tony Tan is also involved with the community in various other ways. For example, he is the Chief Scout of the Singapore Scout Association.

Perhaps Dr Tan Cheng Bock just cannot get politics out of him. He did let slip the word 'politics' during his press conference and then quickly corrected himself with 'no politics here'.

One wonders WHY Dr Tan does not clarify the misunderstanding that a huge number of his fans on his facebook seem to have - that the President's role is to take on the Government?

Why does he allow them to continue to misunderstand?

Lee Kuan Yew: If you who are growing up...

What you cannot defend is not yours.





" I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody is going to knock it down. .."



"At the end of the day all I have to cherish are human relationships. It's the friends you have made, your family ties, which sustain your spirit with a certain warmth and comfort." 

He changed my life: My father and our founding father. By Chua Mui Hoong

When I was growing up, God, my father and Lee Kuan Yew all merged into one.

I was the youngest child in a Teochew-speaking, working-class Chinese household. My parents were immigrants from China, who ran a hawker stall for much of my formative years.

My father was a stern patriarch who was not averse to using the cane. My mother was a traditional Chinese wife and self-sacrificing mother, with a twinkling sense of humour with those close to her. She tended to our household altar, placing platters of food there on religious or festive days. She prayed to the deity who I found out years later is supposed to be the Kitchen God, assigned by the Emperor of Heaven to report on a family's doings. The offerings were meant to placate the deity and sweeten his tongue when he delivered reports.

As for Lee Kuan Yew, he was just the man who founded the nation that I heard and read about. Like God, he was everywhere in the ether. Like God, he was all-powerful and all-knowing. Lee Kuan Yew didn't affect my family's life much in a direct way, although his policies formed the arc within which ordinary lives like ours were lived.

My parents were street hawkers who were fined repeatedly for peddling their wares. Unlike many hawkers grateful to be relocated, they resisted being put into a centre for years. When the frequency of fines grew too overwhelming, they gave up. By then, choice sites like Newton were taken up; they were sent to Timbuktu - a small hawker centre off Alexandra Road, where they struggled to make enough to raise three children.

Apart from the way big policies of the day intersected with our lives, mine was not a political family. The closest I came to Lee Kuan Yew was hearing my father tell the story of how he was standing close by and witnessed the (to him) historic moment when Mr Lee was pushed into a big monsoon drain at Towner Road, while touring Kallang constituency in 1963.

Lee Kuan Yew close up

I first watched Lee Kuan Yew close up in 1983, when I was 15. By then, my parents could afford a second-hand black-and-white TV set. Sitting in the living room, I watched his National Day Rally speech live.

I didn't know it then, but this was his famous speech on graduate mothers. It went on into the night, and I remember I was riveted, moving from the sofa to toilet reluctantly for pee breaks.

In junior college, we would discuss Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore politics incessantly. At 18, I won a Public Service Commission Overseas Merit Scholarship to study English literature at Cambridge University in England.

Like hundreds of exam-smart Singaporeans from poor families, who got government scholarships that opened doors to good careers, I am a beneficiary of the meritocratic scholarship system Mr Lee created.

In my case, though I was contracted to work in the civil service for eight years after my studies, I broke my bond. I approached Singapore Press Holdings, which agreed to hire me and buy out my bond. I remember walking to the Public Service Commission with the SPH cheque for $140,000 that bought my freedom from the civil service. I have remained grateful to SPH ever since. After 24 years, I still love my job as a journalist.

When I joined The Straits Times Political Desk in 1991, Lee Kuan Yew became less of a myth, and much more real.

Over the years, I would cover Mr Lee on many more occasions, including in Singapore, at Tanjong Pagar and in Parliament, and overseas, in China and Malaysia.

Videos of him in the 1970s show a gruff, thuggish figure with an aggressive chin thrust, given to raised arms, finger-pointing and trouser-hiking. By the time I met him, from the mid-1990s, he was already in his 70s and 80s, and had mellowed considerably.

Fiery rhetoric

But when required, his oratory was just as fiery as ever.

Two parliamentary speeches in the last 20 years stood out for me. One was in November 1994. After hours of debate on the proposal to peg ministers' pay to top private-sector professionals', including a suggestion to put the proposal to a referendum, Mr Lee rose and put an end to it, saying: "I am pitting my judgment after 40 years in politics, and I've been in this chamber since 1955, against all the arguments on the other side... against all the arguments the doubters can muster."

Enough said. Done deal.

In 1996, there were complaints about property purchases by Mr Lee and his son Hsien Loong, then the Deputy Prime Minister. Amid the unhappiness about ministers having an "inside track" to VIP priority bookings for condominiums, it took Mr Lee to call a spade a spade.

Businesses want to get the best customers to help sell and add value to their products, he said, adding: "Let us be realistic... I ask all of you to be honest, including Mr Chiam (See Tong). All ministers who carry weight, all MPs who are popular, you go to a hawker centre. If they gave the other customer one egg, they'll give you two. Count on it."

In words that entered the lexicon of Mr Lee's hard truths, he thundered in the House, telling MPs to be realistic that some people would be given better treatment by businesses than others: "Let's grow up!"

Over the years, I came to know of his reputation for imprisoning political opponents. I read critical biographies of him. I had even covered and written news articles on some of the defamation suits he brought against his critics.

But when I covered him at a press conference, or sat across a table from him in an interview, I would put aside those thoughts and focus on the issue at hand.

In any case, I usually had my colleagues around me. I wasn't a political opponent. I was a journalist, and I knew Mr Lee respected the role of journalists. Much as he might berate us or our editors when he disagreed with something we wrote, he knew our job was to ask honest, if difficult, and to him annoying, questions. And while the Singapore Government can be authoritarian, it respects the rule of law.

I once asked if he was satisfied with the level of political contest, or if he should have done more to create the conditions for an alternative in Singapore.

His answer: "We'll be quite happy if we get a small group of equal calibre contesting against us. I mean you look at the NMPs, they talk more sense, right? Would they fight an election? No. So? But they've got the brain power, they've got the knowledge, but they're not prepared to jump into the sea."

My counter: "That's because many people are intimidated by the PAP, the climate of fear, crackdown on dissent and so on."

Mr Lee: "No, no. Are you intimidated?"

Me: "Well, asking you this question, obviously I'm not. I just feel that there's a perception."

Mr Lee went on to add that if a person joined an opposition party, "he takes us on, we'll take him on. But you can't join the Workers' Party and we just let him lambast us away. We'll demolish him as hard as he tries to demolish us. That's part of the game, right? I mean you say that's intimidation?"

Growing fond

I don't remember when exactly I started to get fond of him. It was certainly after my conversion to Christianity, when my concept of God changed from a punitive deity chalking up wrongdoings, to one who loved and sacrificed for humanity.

It was also after my own stern father became an unlikely doting grandfather who chased after his crawling grandson, trying to feed him durian. God and my father were no longer distant, disapproving figures. They had become real beings I could relate to.

And so had Lee Kuan Yew.

A few incidents come to mind.

In March 2003, I wrote a long, personal account of my battle with breast cancer. I wanted to destigmatise it, and to encourage people going through terminal illness, and their caregivers, to talk about it, and not to impose on those with serious illness the additional burden of secrecy.

Mr Lee wrote to me a few days later, wishing me good luck and good health, and saying he looked forward to reading my articles.

He also shared about the time his son went through chemotherapy, 11 years earlier, and how one lived with the uncertainty, even in remission, of whether the cancer would return. "The searing experience tempered his character and made him more philosophical about his life. I think it has similarly tempered you."

I was touched by his good wishes for my health.

He also sent me a note in June 2010 to say he enjoyed reading my book Pioneers Once More, a history of the Singapore public service. He offered some vignettes of senior civil servants that he said I could include in future editions. Again, I was touched by his generous words, and that he bothered.

I began to see a lot more of Mr Lee from December 2008 to October 2009, when my colleagues and I conducted 16 interviews with him for Hard Truths. He was vigorous, engaging, sometimes a little testy, but never rude or nasty.

I heard him speak of his wife and his daily ritual of reading to her when she lay bedridden after a stroke. Devoid of her company, he would converse with the nurses during lunch. I heard the stoic loneliness in his voice after she died. I saw the indulgent grandfather reluctant to forbid his grandchildren to touch his things when they sniffled, but who would discreetly wipe down his computer with disinfecting wipes after they left so as not to catch their bug. Although he was reputed for having no small talk, he sometimes told us about his ailments or his day.

I covered Mrs Lee's funeral in October 2010 at Mandai Crematorium. He walked up to her coffin with a single red rose. His hand touched his lips, then her forehead, planting a kiss there once, and then, as though he could not bear to part, again.

Somewhere along the line amid those incidents, I grew fond of the old man.

In 2012, I was involved in another round of interviews for the book One Man's View Of The World. Last year, we interviewed him a few more times to update the book.

He grew visibly more frail over the years. From open-buttoned jackets, he moved on to buttoned up ones, sometimes with a scarf round the neck. From walking in his trainers, he had to be supported.

We once had to wait 30 minutes for him to rest and he apologised, saying he had not been able to keep his food down. He had an injury once, and conducted the interview with a heat pad around his thigh. He was on meal supplement Ensure and various medications his security officers would give him. His speech got slurred towards the end. From over two hours, the interviews went down to 45 minutes or less.

It pained me to sit across the table over several years and watch Mr Lee weaken. He was the founding father of Singapore. I liked to remember him as the vigorous Prime Minister in television footage, or at least as the still active Minister Mentor in 2009, who told us no question was off limits, and hurried us to complete our book, chiding us not to let the grass grow under our feet.

But somewhere along the line, I came to see him less as Lee Kuan Yew the mythic figure, the great statesman, the fearsome political leader. I came to see him as a man, a flawed but still great mortal, a man who did his best for his country, for his time, the best he knew how.

Luckily for all of us, his best was enough.

29 Mar 2015

Lee Kuan Yew: Grand Master of Asia

Excerpt from Lee Kuan Yew, Grand Master of Asia, published by The National Interest, March 1, 2013:

Among the seven billion inhabitants of planet Earth today, only one has created a modern Asian city-state whose nearly six million inhabitants now enjoy higher levels of income than Americans. Only one individual has been called “mentor” by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who initiated China's march to the market, and its new leader Xi Jinping. Only one individual has been called upon for counsel about these developments by every U.S. president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. That individual is Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore.

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/lee-kuan-yew-grand-master-asia-8169

Lee Kuan Yew: I have no regrets

Lee Kuan Yew’s unique view of the world was shaped dramatically by his second world war experience, during which he not only narrowly escaped death but saw the cruelty and oppression inflicted on Singapore, then part of a bigger Malaya. The helplessness of their plight despite the assumed protection of a colonial overlord planted the first notion of self-rule for the people of Malaya in the mind of the young Lee. The belief gained momentum and was further galvanised during the period when he studied law in the UK and met like-minded Malayans, who shared the conviction that they were as good as any colonialists to govern themselves.

The legacy of Lee Kuan Yew is not about one man’s quest to change the world. The story of Lee Kuan Yew is filled with people who shared, rallied along and often time helped shaped his vision for a better Singapore. It is a story of camaraderie of the old guard leaders who emerged from the crucible of battles against the communists and communalists who threatened the survival of the newly independent country. Lee Kuan Yew counted on capable men, men with gumption and integrity to build the nation, the likes of Toh Chin Chye, Goh Keng Swee, Hon Sui Sen, S Rajaratnam and EW Barker, whom he trusted and allowed to stamp their own mark on the nation.

It continued with a younger generation of leaders that he eventually passed the reins of government to. It is this quality of a pragmatic sense of self and mortality that made him recognise that the work of nation building would go beyond him. The quest for renewal and succession allows new leaders to be raised and tested. It is perhaps this one legacy that will stand the future of Singapore in good stead, a quality that good leaders would do well to emulate.

The legacy of Lee Kuan Yew is one of a man who was willing to push and even change himself to change his nation. He lived his life as an example for others to follow and that could well be the most compelling and long lasting principle that he leaves. It was perhaps his conviction that a leader should set the example that he imposed such high personal standards for himself and others, especially those in his party and in government. He demanded absolute honesty and incorruptibility from all around him. While his achievements were marked by excellence, for instance his double-starred first class in law from Cambridge, he never stopped to push himself to learn and change even as he advanced in age. He picked up Mandarin in order to better engage the leaders of China, as they emerged from decades of isolation from the world.

What is most remarkable about Lee Kuan Yew, the giant amongst world leaders whom heads of some of the powerful countries sought for counsel and advice, is that he kept his personal and family life relatively well-guarded and away from the accoutrement of power. Moving in the corridors of power has not altered his lifestyle. Photographs and anecdotes of his family life show the deep bond that he shared with his wife and the relatively simple lives they and their family lived away from the public limelight.

At the end of his life, what mattered most was family and country. This is a man who devoted all his life to ensure the success and prosperity of the country he played such a large role in founding and at the same time maintained such a disciplined personal regime in order to entrench the values that will ensure its continued survival far less success. While critics and detractors may have questioned his methods and even motives, when his body is laid in state before the public over the next few days, as his entire adult life has been so openly scrutinised, the simple truth is all he did was driven by what he felt was right for Singapore.

*All of us at The Asian Banker are deeply saddened by the passing of Singapore’s first prime minister and founding father, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. He stood as a giant among world leaders despite the size of the nation that he led. Not one who yearned the world’s approval or acclaim, he lived by only one belief; “what is right for Singapore”. He will be remembered best for transforming Singapore into one of the most progressive as well as pragmatic countries in the world. His legacy in building a meritocratic, multi-cultural and inclusive nation as well as his personal ethos of discipline, self-sacrifice and unstinting commitment to his people and country will live on. We send our deepest condolence to his family, all Singaporeans and friends of Singapore who mourn his passing.

Published by The Asian Banker, 24 March 2015

What Mdm Kwa Geok Choo saw in Mr Lee Kuan Yew

They started out as school rivals.

To Mr Lee Kuan Yew's horror, he came in second behind Miss Kwa Geok Choo in English and Economics at Raffles College in 1940. Seven years later, they were married in a secret ceremony in England.

In 2003, Mrs Lee Kuan Yew speaks about her marriage of 56 years in an e-mail interview with ST Senior Correspondent M. NIRMALA.

ST: How did you know, when you first met Mr Lee, that he had the qualities you wanted in a man to spend your life with? What were these qualities? And what are the qualities you admire most in SM?

Mrs Lee:
When I first met Kuan Yew in Raffles Institution in 1939, I did not know that one day I would marry him.

Between then and 1947, I did not spend any time listing the qualities I wanted in a husband, and ticking them off one by one each time I met him to see if he had any, or all of them.

The qualities I admire most in him are his powers of persuasion:

(a) He persuaded me to marry him, but I would have to wait for him for three years while he studied in England to qualify as a lawyer.

(b) He persuaded a British army officer to give him a priority passage on the troopship Britannic to get him to England.

(c) When he got to London, he persuaded Professor Hughes Parry, head of the Law Faculty of London School of Economics, to take him in two weeks after term had started, although he had turned others away.

(d) After a few miserable weeks in London, he persuaded W. S. Thatcher, the Censor of FitzWilliam House, Cambridge, to take him in one term late.

(e) When I was awarded the Queens Scholarship in July 1947, he persuaded W. S. Thatcher to write to the Mistress of Girton College about taking in his girlfriend, me.

(f) He met the Mistress and persuaded her that I was exceptional and worth taking in for that academic year.

(g) The Education Department in Singapore doubted that I had been offered a place in Girton College; they had not been able to get Eddie Barker a place in Cambridge even though he had won the Queens Scholarship the previous year (1946). Eddie did not get in till the following year. Kuan Yew persuaded Girton College to send a telegram to the Singapore authorities to confirm they would take me in 1947, and so they sent me to England in September that year.

So I did not have to wait three years before he married me.