From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

A Chief Justice and a President
Selecting the right man for a key constitutional position, like the chief justice or
the president of the republic, is vital. A wrong choice could mean years of public
embarrassment and endless problems. It is easier to decide who is the ablest than
to predict who has the character to measure up to the job. I knew both the chief
justice and the president intimately for many years before their appointments.
One was an unqualified success; the other was an unfortunate accident that could
have been avoided.
The chief justice sets the tone of the judiciary. When we were about to join
Malaysia in August 1963, the last British chief justice, Sir Alan Rose, retired in
order to allow me to nominate the first Singaporean chief justice. For this
appointment, I looked for someone with a philosophy of society that was not at
odds with mine. The inarticulate major premises of the chief justice and his
understanding of the objectives of a good government are of vital importance.
I had one memorable exchange with Sir Alan. When several communist
rioters were to be tried in our courts in the early 1960s, I feared that their case
would be heard by an expatriate British judge who might be insensitive to the
political feelings of the time. I asked to see the chief justice and explained to him
that the government would be vulnerable to the charge of being a stooge of the
British government if this were to happen. He looked at me quizzically and said,
“Prime Minister, when I was chief justice in Ceylon I had to act as officer
administering the government in place of the governor-general. He was away
during a period of turmoil. You need have no fear that you will be embarrassed.”
He understood the need for political sensitivity.
It was with some care that I chose Wee Chong Jin to be the new chief justice.
He was then a high court judge appointed by a British governor. He came from a
middle-class background, was Cambridge-educated like me, a Catholic and an
anti-communist. He was strong on law and order. Sir Alan recommended him as
having the firmness to keep discipline in the courts and have them follow the
norms he set.
He remained chief justice till the age of 72 in 1990. I had extended his term
beyond retirement at 65 because I could not find a suitable successor. Wee knew
his law and presided with authority in his courts both at first instance and on
appeals. Cast in the mould of chief justices of the British era, he concentrated
primarily on his judgements and the workings of the Supreme Court but did not

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give as much attention to the lower courts or to the workings of the judicial
system as a whole. Because of a great increase in litigation, the old system, both
in the lower and higher courts, had become congested. The wheels of justice
turned slowly, work piled up and cases took 4–6 years to come to trial. It was
nearly as slow in the lower courts which handled the majority of cases.
I had decided in 1988 to resign as prime minister at the end of 1990.
Knowing that my successor, Goh Chok Tong, had no association with the legal
profession and would have difficulty deciding on a suitable chief justice, I
searched for the right person to appoint before I stepped down. I met all the
judges separately and got each one of them to list for me, in order of merit, three
persons whom he considered suitable for the office, excluding himself. Then
with each judge, I went through the list of members of the Bar; we also
considered outstanding lawyers from the Malaysian Bar. Four judges, A.P.
Rajah, P. Coomaraswamy, L.P. Thean and S.K. Chan, placed Yong Pung How
first on their list, rating him the best.
Pung How was then chairman of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation
(OCBC), the largest Singapore bank. After the 1969 Kuala Lumpur race riots, he
had left a thriving law practice of which he was a senior partner and moved with
his family to Singapore where he became chairman of a new merchant bank. We
had been fellow students at the Cambridge Law School for three years and I
knew the quality of his work. I had borrowed his lecture notes for the 1946
Michaelmas term which I had missed. They were comprehensive and orderly
and gave me a good synopsis of the lectures. Six months later, in June 1947, I
took a First in the first-year law examinations; so did Pung How. We kept in
touch after we returned home. In the late 1960s he was appointed chairman of
Malaysia-Singapore Airlines by the two governments that jointly owned it. I
renewed close interaction with him when he was seconded by the OCBC in 1981
to be managing director of the Government Investment Corporation which we
had formed to manage and invest Singapore’s reserves. He was thorough,
meticulous and scrupulously fair in his presentation of the alternatives for an
investment, although he expressed his preferences. This was an important
judicial quality.
I had offered to make him a judge of the Supreme Court in 1976 when he
was vice-chairman of the OCBC; he declined. Over lunch in early 1989, I asked
him to consider becoming chief justice. My argument was that he had already
reached the top position in our biggest bank and his efforts there could only
benefit several thousand employees and many more shareholders. As chief

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justice he would be able to bring the administration of justice up to date and
bring untold benefits to the whole society and our economy. If he agreed, he
would first have to be a Supreme Court judge for a year to get himself back into
the law before he took up the appointment as chief justice. He asked for time to
think it over. It would mean a change of lifestyle. He would also lose financially.
In the bank, he was paid over S$2 million a year; as a judge, he would earn less
than S$300,000, one-seventh of his banker’s remuneration. After a month, he
accepted my offer out of a sense of duty; Singapore had given him his second
home.
I made him a judge of the Supreme Court on 1 July 1989, and in September
1990, when Chief Justice Wee retired, I appointed Yong Pung How chief justice.
He had suffered through the years of Japanese occupation and experienced the
race riots in Malaysia. He also had strong views on the administration of the law
to ensure order in society. His views on a multiracial society and how it should
be nurtured and governed and his approach to law and order in such a society in
this part of the world were not different from mine.
He understood that to cope with the new workload, antiquated practices had
to be abandoned and new procedures adopted to deal with all cases with
dispatch, in the lowest to the highest courts. I suggested that he personally visit
the lower courts, even sit with the magistrates and district judges to have first-
hand knowledge of their work, assess their capabilities, tighten up the system
and bring in additional talent. Work discipline needed to be restored. Lawyers
had complained to me that several magistrates and district judges would leave
their cars just outside the city limits to avoid paying the small fee charged during
peak hours. After the licensing period was over they would adjourn their courts
and drive their cars into the city centre. Such was the slackness of the system.
Yong Pung How turned out to be an outstanding chief justice. He gave
leadership to the judges and set a high tone for the Bar. Within a few years he
had reformed and updated the courts and their procedures, and reduced the
backlog and the delays in cases awaiting trial. He amended the rules and
practices that lawyers took advantage of to procrastinate and postpone their
cases. To cope with the increased litigation he recommended the appointment of
additional judges of the Supreme Court and as many judicial commissioners
(senior lawyers discharging the duties of a judge) as the work required. His
selection methods were systematic and fair. After meeting a large cross-section
of lawyers who were recognised as leading members of the Bar, he short-listed
20 and sought the assessments of each of the existing judges and judicial

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commissioners on their overall integrity, legal ability and likely “judicial
temperament”. Then he made his recommendations to the prime minister.
For appointments to the Court of Appeal, he asked each judge and judicial
commissioner to name two of their number whom he thought the most suitable,
excluding himself. The two he finally recommended were the unanimous choice
of all their peers. His methods, known to all the judges and senior lawyers,
raised the standing and prestige of all judges and judicial commissioners.
He introduced information technology into the courts to speed up their work;
lawyers can now file their court documents and make searches through their
computers. By 1999 the reputation of our courts brought visits by judges and
chief justices from developing as well as developed countries to study his
reorganisation. The World Bank recommended Singapore’s system, both at high
court and subordinate court levels, for other countries to learn from.
World rating agencies have given Singapore high marks for its judicial
system. Throughout the 1990s the World Competitiveness Yearbook published
by the Swiss-based Institute for Management Development placed Singapore at
the top in Asia for “confidence in the fair administration of justice in the
society”. For 1997–98, it put Singapore within the top 10 globally, ahead of the
United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and most OECD countries. From
1995, when it began rating the legal systems in Asia, the Hong Kong-based
Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd rated Singapore’s judicial system
as the best in Asia.
I was less fortunate in my choice of president. I had worked with Devan Nair
since 1954 when I moved his election as president in Parliament in 1981. In the
afternoon of 15 March 1985 I was shocked when told that Devan had acted in a
bizarre manner while visiting Kuching in Sarawak, an East Malaysian state. The
Sarawak state physician had phoned Nair’s personal physician, Dr J.A.
Tambyah, on 14 March to ask him to take the president back because of his
behaviour. Nair had been uninhibited with women, including the wife of an
assistant minister who accompanied him in a car, women at dinners and nurses
who looked after him. He outraged their modesty, propositioned them, fondled
and molested them. After informing our director of medical services, Dr
Tambyah flew at once to Kuching, where he found Nair had collapsed and lost
control of himself, and accompanied him back on 15 March.
That same evening, at about 9:00 pm, I saw Mrs Nair at the Istana Lodge. To

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help me break the unhappy news, I brought Choo who knew her well. My note
to the cabinet the following day read:
“Mrs Nair was collected and could barely suppress her disgust and anger
at the news that Devan had misbehaved in Kuching and collapsed. She
told my wife and me that Devan was a changed man, that he had been
drinking heavily from time to time, and for the last few months had
consumed a bottle of whisky every night. She had sent the servants off
early so that they would not know that he would get totally drunk and
incapable, when he would often beat her. She knew this would happen in
Sarawak and had refused to go.
“In the weeks before his Sarawak visit, Devan Nair had been driving
a car alone out of the Istana. He had disguised himself with a wig and
had gone out without his security officer or his driver to meet a German
woman. One morning, after he had been out for the night, Mrs Nair went
to Changi Cottage to check. She discovered liquor bottles, glasses with
lipstick marks and cigarettes. Devan Nair had also brought the German
woman to the Istana Lodge for dinner. When Mrs Nair remonstrated,
there was a row and he had beaten her. He was not in control of himself
and his temper in his drinking bouts.”
Seven of our best specialists examined and treated him. The most senior of
them, a psychiatrist, Dr R. Nagulendran, in a report of 23 March wrote, “He
(Nair) suffers from ALCOHOLISM [sic] characterised by many years of alcohol
consumption; periodic bouts of heavy and continuous drinking; psychological
dependence on alcohol; lapses of memory; intermittent hallucinations;
impotency; personality changes; disruption of matrimonial harmony.”
Under the constitution, the president could not be charged for any crime. If
he killed someone while driving under the influence of alcohol, there would be
public outrage. The cabinet discussed these developments at several meetings
and decided that he had to resign before he was discharged from hospital and
could resume his activities, or Parliament would have to remove him from
office. The old ministers, especially Raja, Eddie Barker and I, were upset at
having to remove an old colleague from so prominent a public office. We felt
keenly for his family but concluded that we had no choice; leaving him in office
would cause greater harm. On 27 March, when he had recovered sufficiently to
understand the implications of what he had done, Raja and I saw him at the

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Singapore General Hospital. After some hesitation, he agreed to resign.
The following day, 28 March, Nair wrote to me:
“About a year ago, I knew myself for a confirmed alcoholic. It was only
then that the DECEPTION [sic] began. I occasionally thought of
confiding in you, but put things off in cowardly fashion. The last time I
was on the verge of confiding in you was when we met some two weeks
ago in my office, before I left for Kuching. I had missed my last chance
to come clean. This proved my undoing.”
A fortnight later, in a letter dated 11 April, Nair wrote:
“I could still remember a few other things besides, including some of my
aberrant conduct in Singapore during the fortnight before I left for
Kuching. What frightens me, however, is that I simply cannot recall most
of the reports on how I had behaved in Kuching. And yet they must be
true, because several witnesses have attested to my conduct and to the
remarks I made. What confuses me further is that on at least two
occasions, of which I have clear memories, the reports contradict them. I
am not a liar, but then there were the witnesses. Some of them may be
liars, as I tend to believe, but not all of them can be liars. In the old days
they talked of one being possessed. Was I possessed? Or was it a Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde situation?
“Perhaps there has been some brain damage. Almost certainly my
brain functions must have been impaired, but to what extent remains to
be seen. And to what extent can what has been impaired be repaired or
even restored? That too remains to be seen.”
I had two roles: my first, as prime minister, was to protect the dignity of the
office of president and Singapore’s reputation; my second, as a personal friend,
made me want to save him. After several days in hospital we sent him off to
Changi Cottage to dry him out. He insisted on going to an 
ashram
(retreat) in
India, to meditate and cure himself the Hindu way. I did not think he would get
better that way and urged him to go for treatment. After considerable persuasion
by Raja, Eddie and some other old friends including S.R. Nathan, another close
friend from NTUC days (later our president), he agreed to go to the Caron
Foundation in the United States. A month later the treatment appeared
successful.

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Nair insisted that we give him a pension. There was no provision in the
constitution for any pension for the president. The cabinet decided to offer a
pension to Devan on compassionate grounds, but on condition that a panel of
government doctors saw him from time to time. Eddie Barker settled it with
Nair, and moved the resolution in Parliament. After it was passed Nair turned it
down, denying that he had agreed to the condition. The government did not
remove the condition and Nair became embittered.
One and a half years later, in a letter published in the