From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

party to an army where there had to be constant recruitment. Most would join as
privates, some as officers. Some would not be more than sergeants. It did not
follow that all who joined as officers would become generals. Those who proved
their worth, whether or not they had university degrees, would be promoted. I
had to prepare the ground for a thorough change of office holders. I protected the
interests of the faithful by a Parliamentary Pensions Act. All those who had
served for not less than nine years as MPs, parliamentary secretaries and
ministers would be entitled to pensions.
Of all my ministers, Hon Sui Sen was the best at talent scouting. It was he
who chose Goh Chok Tong to run Neptune Orient Lines, our national shipping
line, when it was making a loss; Goh turned it around in a few years. Sui Sen
also brought in Dr Tony Tan, who later became our deputy prime minister. He
was a physics lecturer at the University of Singapore, then the general manager
of Singapore’s largest bank, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation. Sui Sen
talent-spotted S. Dhanabalan, who had worked with him in the EDB and was in
the Development Bank of Singapore; he was later to be a minister in charge of
several important portfolios.
I systematically scanned the top echelons of all sectors in Singapore – the
professions, commerce, manufacturing and trade unions – to look for men and
women in their 30s and 40s whom we would persuade to stand as our
candidates. Ability can be assessed fairly accurately by a person’s academic
record and achievement in work. Character is not so easily measured. After some
successes but too many failures, I concluded that it was more important, though
more difficult, to assess a person’s character.
In 1970, when the American spaceship Apollo 13 malfunctioned nearly
300,000 miles out in space, I watched the unfolding drama, fascinated. One false
move by any one of the three men on board would have left them drifting out
into outer space, never to return. They remained calm and collected throughout
the ordeal, entrusting their survival to the judgement of the men at ground
control whose instructions they followed meticulously. I saw this as proof that

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NASA’s psychological and other tests conducted on the ground, simulating the
weightless and isolated conditions in spaceships, had successfully eliminated
those who were prone to panic in a crisis. I decided to have one psychologist and
one psychiatrist test our candidates.
They put prospective PAP election candidates who had the potential to be
ministers through psychological tests designed to define their character profile,
intelligence, personal backgrounds and values. These tests were not conclusive
but they helped to eliminate the obviously unsuitable and were an advance on
gut reactions during a two-hour interview. From time to time I would disagree
with the conclusions of the psychologists, especially where I felt the candidate
had been smarter than the interviewer and been able to “fake good” without
appearing to do so.
Professor H.J. Eysenck, a psychologist from London University who visited
Singapore in 1987, reinforced my view that testing for IQ and personality and
character traits was useful. He cited an American oil MNC that employed 40
psychologists for the recruitment and promotion of 40,000 employees. We did
not have enough trained psychologists to assess the candidates for important
appointments. After a discussion with him, I got the NUS to train more
behavioural psychologists to help in selecting people with the right attributes for
various jobs.
I also checked with corporate leaders of MNCs how they recruited and
promoted their senior people, and decided one of the best systems was that
developed by Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil company. They concentrated on what
they termed a man’s “currently estimated potential”. This was determined by
three qualities – a person’s power of analysis, his imagination and his sense of
reality. Together they made up an over-arching attribute Shell called “helicopter
quality”, the ability to see facts or problems in a larger context and to identify
and zoom in on critical details. A panel of assessors, at least two of whom must
know the person being assessed, could accurately rank executives of broadly
similar abilities for helicopter quality. After trying out the system and finding it
practical and reliable, I adopted it for our public service in 1983, replacing the
British system we had inherited.
Some people are naturally better than others in seeing into or through a
person, and make excellent interviewers and assessors. One such outstanding
person was Tan Teck Chwee, the chairman of our Public Service Commission
from 1975 to 1988. No candidate for recruitment or officer for promotion
succeeded in deceiving him. It had nothing to do with Tan’s undoubtedly high

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IQ. It had much to do with a different part of his mind that enabled him to read a
person’s character from his facial expression, tone of voice and body language.
Another with this gift is Lim Kim San, a former senior cabinet minister. I put
him on every panel for the selection of PAP candidates for election. His
assessments were more visceral than cerebral and most times correct. His exact
opposite, a cerebral person lacking this gift, was Goh Keng Swee. Often he
would pick an officer or an aide and rave about his excellent qualities based on
the man’s paperwork. Six to 12 months later, he would be looking for a
replacement. He simply could not see through a person. Psychologists call this
ability social or emotional intelligence.
My attempt to inject new blood into the leadership was not without stress.
Several old guard ministers were concerned about the pace at which they were
being replaced. Toh Chin Chye said that I should stop talking about the old
guard getting old because they were not getting old that fast, that I was
demoralising them. I disagreed. We were all slowing down and visibly ageing,
including me and Toh himself. In cabinet he would put an electric heater under
the cabinet table to blow warm air over his feet. I could see myself in the mirror.
I did not feel the same inexhaustible enthusiasm and zest to see and find out
things for myself. More and more I relied on reports, photographs and videos.
Toh and several of the old guard wanted our successors to come up the same
way we had done, as activists, not by head-hunting and direct recruitment. Keng
Swee, Rajaratnam, Kim San and Sui Sen did not believe there was much chance
of reproducing ourselves in that way. After the December 1980 elections, I
decided to send a clear signal to all the old guard that the course of self-renewal
was irreversible, although the pace would depend on how successful the new
MPs proved to be. I left Toh out of the new cabinet. I was concerned that several
of the old-timers might rally around him to slow down the pace of self-renewal. I
sensed that one old guard minister, Ong Pang Boon, shared Toh’s unease, as did
a number of the older ministers of state and parliamentary secretaries including
Lee Khoon Choy, Fong Sip Chee, Chan Chee Seng and Chor Yock Eng. I had to
drop Toh to pre-empt any split in the leadership. It was painful after so many
years working together. The support of the old guard had made possible what we
had achieved, but it was our joint responsibility to ensure that Singapore
continued to be governed by able, honest and dedicated men. The original team
had peaked and was running out of steam.
The new MPs, bright young men who had won scholarships to renowned
universities overseas and in Singapore, were taking over key jobs within three to

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four years of joining the PAP. The veterans felt that they should not have such
an easy path to office, but should learn and wait. I did not think young and
talented men would sit and wait; either they were going to make it or they would
want to move on.
Toh was bitter. I offered to make him our high commissioner in London, but
he did not want to leave Singapore because of his young daughter’s education.
He found another appointment for himself. He stayed on in Parliament for
another two terms, sniping at me and the PAP, never enough to be accused of
disloyalty, but enough to be a mild embarrassment. I did not want to put him
down publicly.
After I dropped Toh from the cabinet, I told Pang Boon that I would appoint
him for another term, but I could not allow any obstruction to self-renewal. He
understood and we avoided a clash. When he retired in December 1984, I wrote
to him expressing my appreciation for his work from 1959 to 1984, adding,
“I also thank you for helping in the selection of candidates for self-
renewal. You had certain reservations. You pointed out that only time
and crises can reveal latent defects in a person. I agree with you. You
also had misgivings, as had Chin Chye, over the speed of self-renewal
and the effect it was having on the morale of old guard MPs. I must take
the responsibility for both the method and the pace of self-renewal,
though it is reassuring to me that Goh Keng Swee and Rajaratnam
supported me. A younger team of ministers and MPs have now become
the majority both in cabinet and in Parliament. There is no turning back. I
am confident that the younger leaders will be equal to the task, but if not,
the responsibility will be mine, shared with Keng Swee and Rajaratnam.”
The one retirement I felt most keenly was Keng Swee’s. In mid-1984, he told
me that he had decided, for personal reasons, to step down at the end of the term
and would not contest the next elections. He had done enough and it was time to
go. For several years after he left, he was invaluable as deputy chairman of the
Monetary Authority of Singapore. He also set up the Government of Singapore
Investment Corporation as a separate organisation to handle our national savings
and reserves.
The old guard took some time to accept the new blood, and some were never
reconciled to seeing them promoted over their heads. I understood their feelings.
Fong Sip Chee had been a stalwart PAP cadre member from the 1950s when the

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PAP was an endangered party. He became an MP in 1963 and was a minister of
state from 1981 to 1985. He never understood why he was not more deserving of
promotion and believed, wrongly, that it was because he had not been to
university. Others like Ch’ng Jit Koon, a minister of state, and Ho Kah Leong, a
parliamentary secretary, both Nanyang graduates, supported and worked with
the new ministers. It was an emotionally difficult but necessary changeover. I
had to do it, whatever my own feelings.
After the 1980 party conference I promoted six young ministers of state to
the cabinet. This encouraged other young talent to join and be tested as ministers
of state. Besides high helicopter quality, they needed to have political sense and
the temperament to establish rapport with grass-roots leaders. Those with these
extra qualities I took into cabinet.
For every person who made it we would have interviewed more than ten.
The attrition rate was high because, despite all the psychological tests, we could
never accurately assess character, temperament and motivation. To succeed, the
man (or woman) and his spouse and family had to be prepared for loss of
privacy and time. Nursing a constituency and attending official functions, plus a
lower income than they could earn outside, made political office unattractive.
Most of all, the person must have that extra, the capacity to work with people
and persuade them to support his policies.
I decided 1988 would be the last elections I would lead as prime minister.
After I won, I asked the younger ministers to decide among themselves whom
they would support as prime minister. I had helped to select them as MPs and
appointed them as ministers. I wanted my successor to have the support of his
peers. I had seen how Deng Xiaoping had failed with his appointees, Hu
Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. I also remembered how Anthony Eden, chosen by
Winston Churchill, failed. The younger ministers chose Goh Chok Tong.
Chok Tong was not a natural politician. He was tall, gangling and awkward,
and spoke English with a heavy Hokkien accent. When he became an MP in
1976 he was self-conscious and without the gift of speech-making. But he had
ability, dedication and drive, and was interested in people. Soon after I brought
him into the cabinet I advised him to take lessons to improve his public-speaking
skills. We found an English woman to teach him and some of the other new
ministers to speak in a more relaxed, natural way. From my own experience in
learning Mandarin and Hokkien, I knew it was not easy to change childhood
speech patterns. I described to Chok Tong my own experience, how for years I
spent hours in between work practising Mandarin and Hokkien with teachers to

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improve my fluency. My old teachers introduced Mandarin teachers to him. He
applied himself with determination and became a much more effective
communicator.
In the 1990 cabinet, together with Chok Tong, were Ong Teng Cheong, S.
Dhanabalan, Tony Tan, Yeo Ning Hong, Lee Yock Suan, S. Jayakumar, Richard
Hu, Wong Kan Seng, Lee Hsien Loong, Yeo Cheow Tong, Ahmad Mattar and
George Yeo. I had brought together men of integrity and ability with strong
commitment to society. After several years of experience working together with
the old guard in cabinet, they were as prepared as could be. I resigned that
November.
I had been prime minister for 31 years. To have stayed on for another term
would have proved nothing except that I was still fit and effective. On the other
hand, if in the years that I had left, I was able to help my successor get a grip on
his job and succeed, that would be my final contribution to Singapore. I did not
suffer any withdrawal syndrome. Chok Tong did not want to move into my old
office in the Istana Annexe, which I had occupied for 20 years since I moved
from City Hall, but chose to create a new office on the floor above mine. I
continued to make a contribution through discussions in cabinet and in bilateral
meetings with the prime minister and other ministers.
Chok Tong’s style, the way he worked with his team, was different from
mine. He carefully planned the various steps he needed to swing public opinion
slowly towards the desired goal. It worked. In the January 1997 elections, the
PAP increased its percentage of votes from 61 per cent to 65 per cent for the 36
constituencies contested. It won back two of the four seats lost in 1991. Prime
Minister Goh and his ministers were in full command.
A crisis tested Chok Tong and his team in mid-1998 when our currency went
down in value, and stock and property prices fell by 40 per cent following the
collapse of our neighbours’ economies. Many MNCs retrenched workers in
Singapore and transferred their operations to our lower-cost neighbours. The
problem was similar to the recession in 1985 when we had overpriced ourselves
by allowing higher wages, fees and taxes and other costs. The solution then was
a raft of cost-cutting measures, 15 per cent decrease in employers’ contribution
to workers’ CPF and lower fees and taxes. Chok Tong’s team worked out a
similar package that reduced costs by cutting taxes and lowering employers’
contribution to the CPF from 20 per cent to 10 per cent. Retrenchments slowed
down. By the middle of 1999 the economy had revived. Their steady and
competent management of the crisis won them the confidence of international

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fund managers and investors.

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September 1999. Cabinet meeting with Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in the
chair. (SPH/Straits Times)

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1950s. Colonial outpost.