Rahul Goswami :
Missing from what passes for fresh analysis of Singapore (the Republic of, which was also, in earlier times, the Straits Settlements, and Singhapuram) is objectivity about what the city-state has become, who made it so, and the social costs of its transformation.
The idea of a “founding father” of Singapore is as misplaced as the idea that here is a city which was once “third world” and through trade and globalisation became “first world”. Both ideas are untrue but both are popular, partly because the Republic of Singapore’s official machinery worked hard to get these views popularised, whether in Asia or in the West. The development of Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s is due to the efforts of a large and committed group of people – amongst them were Toh Chin Chye, S. Rajaratnam and Goh Keng Swee. This group was the peer group of the man who recently passed away, and whose passing has occasioned all the new, mostly misinformed, analysis.
Perhaps until the middle of the decade of the 1980s (when watches were Casio, when music was the Walkman, and when shopping centres had not become featureless and bland malls) Singapore’s economic development actually helped the majority of Singaporeans. Wages did increase fairly regularly – and these wages were quite a bit higher than prevailing wages for similar work in nearby South-East Asia – there was little income inequality and the city-state’s government was conscientious about paying back (through various peoples’ funds) dividends and interests. The lives of ordinary Singaporeans did improve, especially when compared with countries that were yet to become the misnamed ‘Asian Tiger’ economies.
That period did not last for even a generation. The reasons are not far to seek. Singapore’s ruling party went through changes that altered, fundamentally and unfortunately, its character. Under the direction of the man who recently passed away, the first generation of workers and people’s leaders who shepherded Singapore through a tumultuous independence that included a fractious parting with Malaysia (the Federated States) was removed. The replacements for this generation were to prove utterly unequal to the task that had defined itself in 1965, when Singapore became an independent republic. Gradually, Singaporeans began to feel new burdens – health subsidies were reduced, the prices of public housing and education rose, the wages of low-income workers started stagnating.
From the middle of the decade of the 1990s, this group, still under the command of the “founding father”, dedicated itself to ensuring that Singapore became a showcase of globalisation and of the power of the new capitalists. Financial services became important, as did information technology and what are called ‘life sciences’. The city-state’s economic system assumed predatory characteristics, feeding off low-cost and voiceless labour from neighbouring Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. This pool of floating labour (with no labour laws to protect them) changed the very shape of the city-state by working on the gigantic land reclamation projects. They worked in the port, in the shipping industry and in the many construction and infrastructure projects that began to alter modern, 21st century Singapore. But this labour was based on the 19th century forms of indenture that had existed even during the Straits Settlements days. The vast irony was ignored by the banking and financial services sector, for by then Singapore new roles attracted the attention of the Davos set.
All the time, the public relations apparatus of Singapore’s ruling party worked away. It was far more than plain public relations, it was the seeding of perception, of image and of shiny promises. Through this stage management, the modern and contemporary history of Singapore was being rewritten and redistributed – that for example dictatorial leadership in the earlier years of independence was necessary, that for example Confucian values lent balance to a society rapidly transforming itself. The spin-doctors for new Singapore did not once mention the fear that was instilled into even the highest levels of governance was responsible for breeding a generation (now two generations) of an unquestioning proletariat.
This is the sorry legacy of the man who recently passed away – a small country of unhappy serfs struggling under burdens their parents never dreamt would fall upon Singaporeans, a small country whose income inequality is shameful, whose ruling party has kept itself in power for half a century, whose press freedom ranks on a par with Rwanda and Iraq, whose ‘meritocratic’ and ‘champion of globalisation’ government controls an estimated 60 per cent of the economy. It is a dreadful legacy that hard-working Singaporeans deserve to be rid of.
(Rahul Goswami is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia)
