Excerpts from my current reading. If I was a continent-wide dictator for just one day, I would expressly decree that this one text henceforth becomes mandatory reading for all Africans aspiring for public office!

ON FIGHTING CORRUPTION:
“Start with putting three of your friends to jail. You definitely know what for, and people will believe you.”

ON NOT RESPECTING INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY:
“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters – who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.”

ON GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE:
”Not spending more than we collect in revenue has been a guiding principle from which no Singapore finance minister has departed except in a recession.”

ON AFRICA:
Singapore’s former Prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, the father of the country’s economic miracle of the last 50 years, was a frequent visitor to Africa in the 1960s. On one such trip in 1964, he visited 17 African capitals to acquaint himself with what the newly independent African countries were doing to lift themselves from economic backwardness, itself a legacy of European colonialism of the previous century. From what he saw, Lee Kuan Yew was not best impressed. “I was not optimistic about Africa,” he confessed later. So, what informed his thinking? He explains in this fat book, that certain things were happening in Africa at the time that did not seem quite right to him.

For example, while in Lagos (Nigeria) in January 1966, to attend a Commonwealth Heads of State Conference, Lee Kuan Yew was a bit alarmed by how Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s government was doing things. “I went to bed that night [at the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos] convinced that they were a different people playing to a different set of rules.”

True to his fears, only days after the Commonwealth conference ended, and just as Lee Kuan Yew and his delegation had arrived in Ghana from Nigeria, a military coup happened in Lagos in which President Balewa was killed.

In Ghana, the Singaporean prime minister was welcomed with pomp by President Kwame Nkrumah who was very proud of his bright 30-year-old vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, William Abraham. Abraham had taken a First in Classics at Oxford University (England) and was a fellow of the university’s All Souls College. Lee Kuan Yew was a bit puzzled: “I was impressed [with Abraham], but wondered why a country so dependent on agriculture should have its brightest and best do Classics – Latin and Greek,” Lee Kuan Yew wrote.

Lee Kuan Yew continues: “One month later [after Nigeria’s coup], on 24 February, as Nkrumah was being welcomed with a 21-gun salute in Beijing, China, an army coup took place in Accra. People danced in the streets as the army leaders arrested leading members of Nkrumah’s government. “My fears for the people of Ghana were not misplaced. Notwithstanding their rich cocoa plantations, gold mines, and Volta dam, which could generate enormous amounts of power, Ghana’s economy sank into disrepair and has not recovered the early promise it held out at independence in 1957. The news I heard saddened me. I never visited Ghana again.”

And guess what happened next: After the Ghana coup, Lee Kuan Yew enquired about William Abraham, “the bright young vice chancellor,” and was told that Abraham had entered a monastery in California, USA! “I felt sad,” Lee Kuan Yew recounts. “If their brightest and best gave up the fight and sought refuge in a monastery, not in Africa but in California, the road to recovery would be long and difficult.”

He reveals his impressions about African leaders. Comparing what he saw with the level of puritanistic discipline he had enforced in his own country, he concluded about African leaders “these were a set of people dancing to a different tune.”

And towards the end of 1992, on the eve of South Africa’s transition to a non-racial democracy and in keeping with his own injunctions, Lee Kuan Yew submitted a report to the government in which he made this most pointed observation: “SOUTH AFRICA IS A FIRST WORLD ECONOMY ABOUT TO BE TAKEN OVER BY A THIRD WORLD WORKFORCE.”

Whoa, what an indictment. But how wisdom is justified of her children!