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Lessons for Lanka's leaders

Last week The Sunday Times carried the first in a series of selected extracts from Singapore's senior statesman and former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography, "The Singapore Success".

Example is better than precept
One problem I had anticipated was getting used to power. I had seen what happened with Ong Eng Guan in the City Council, how the underdog had misused it when he became the top dog. I warned my ministers, parliamentary secretaries and assemblymen who were assigned to help mainisters deal with public complaints not to get drunk on power and not to abuse it. It was easier said than done, and on many occasions we still antagonised civil servants.

We were determined to strike while the iron was hot and exploit our post-election popularity. We mounted a series of well-publicised campaigns to clean the streets of the city, clear the beaches of debris and cut the weeds on unkempt vacant land. It was a copycat exercise borrowed from the communists - ostentatious mobilisation of everyone including ministers to toil with their hands and soil their clothes in order to serve the people. We saw no reason why the MCP should have the monopoly of such techniques and organised drives to enthuse the people and involve them in setting higher standards in civic consciousness, general cleanliness and the preservation of public property. One Sunday, Ong Eng Guan would muster government servants to clean up Changi beach. On another, I would take a broom to sweep the city streets with the community leaders.

There were other things we wanted to do. Keng Swee and I planned and formed the People's Association, a statutory board that would embrace all the important voluntary social organisations, clubs and associations for sports, music, ballet, drawing and cooking. We built over one hundred community centres - big ones in the city, small wooden huts in the rural areas - places for education and recreation. Table tennis, basketball, badminton, Chinese chess, lessons in repairing radios and refrigerators and courses in technical trades were some of the activities. We wanted to give people something positive to do, and get them lined up on the side of law and order. Each centre would have a full-time organising secretary to administer it and cater to the needs of those who lived around it. To supervise the centres, the Social Welfare Department would be transformed into a community development department.

We organised a Works Brigade to take in unemployed young men and women, put them in semi-military uniforms, house them in wooden barracks and teach them farming, road building, bricklaying and construction work - generally to put some discipline into them and, most important, to get them off the streets.

But we also had to discipline those already in work, for we badly needed to establish a grip on the unions under communist control to stop their political strikes.

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