250 - The Corruption Scourge Resurfaces in Ever Vigilant Singapore

and South Africa and Hungary

            When sharp-eyed, crusading Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew espied the attractive wife of the government's chief fire officer bedecked at a party in scintillating and expensive gold jewelry, he grew suspicious. The fire officer was soon out of his job and before a court, accused of living well beyond his known means and of benefiting from corruption.

            That dismissal and many others, including his deputy prime minister, in the late 1960s and early 1970s transformed Singapore, rampantly corrupt and penetrated by Chinese triad gangs before Lee came to power in 1965, into the non-corrupt paragon of virtue that it has since become. Lee knew that exemplary dismissals would send a clear message.

            Lee, canny and confident, was determined to transform a third-world cesspool into a first-world oasis (his words). He well understood that corruption greatly sapped the productive energies of small and large formerly colonial outposts. He also appreciated that by eliminating governmental sleaze and influence selling he could tap deeply into the otherwise repressed entrepreneurial endeavors of his ethnically very mixed citizens in the then underdeveloped city-state of Singapore.

            Most of all, Lee reckoned that if he could only rid Singapore of the gang-orchestrated and police-abetted practice of its prevailing corruption that he could deliver good governance outcomes and serious prosperity to what then were 2 million (and now 6 million) Singaporeans.  His crackdown on petty corruption (bribing minor officials for permits, birth certificates, driver's licenses, and the like) and his equal determination to stifle grand corruption (illicit returns from construction contracts, the evasion by corporations of official regulations, fiddling tax rates, and so on) were driven not by morality but by the need to show positive results.

            Singapore's annual GDP per capita has swelled from about $250 in 1965 to $92,000 today.  Its medical system is regarded highly, as are its schooling accomplishments, the probity of its banks, and its overall atmosphere of integrity.  Taxi drivers are not even allowed to accept tips.

            Those accomplishments of unblemished integrity were shattered locally and internationally last week when S. Iswaran, Singapore's recent minister of transport, was accused of receiving $14,077 worth of goods -- whisky, golf clubs, a bicycle, and tickets to British shows and premier soccer matches-- from a billionaire Malaysian magnate in exchange for special concessions that advanced the billionaire's interests in Grand Prix racing and other potentially prosperous initiatives.

            That the total amount of inducements that turned Iswaran are so comparatively trivial, compared to the goods and cash that serious, serial, kleptocrats like Putin and Trump, Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro, former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razek  (now in jail), and Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa have grasped, is indicative of how highly Singapore, now ruled by Lee's son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, regards its successful banishment of political sleaze.

             Not for Singapore the likes of the Putin’s grand dacha in Sochi that the late Alexei Navalny photographed and publicized nor the pilfering of state coffers that was professionalized by Razek. Nor would Singapore have ever tolerated a chief executive profiting from renting out his hotel to foreigners clamoring for attention or letting his son-in-law benefit from contacts made on official business. The Lee family has never monopolized returns from the exploitation of natural resources (Mnangagwa appropriates revenues from gold and lithium that belong to the state and its people) or sold contracts to high bidders (as Mnangagwa does and Bolsonaro did).

            Singapore has not had a serious case of high-level, ministerial rank corruption since 1986.  As Singaporeans always told me when I visited there, "he doesn't allow it." And that is why for more than thirty years the Singaporean city-state has always ranked high in the listings of the top ten least corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International's well-regarded Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).  Usually, Finland, Denmark, or another Nordic country rank first on these annual lists, but Singapore's standing on the CPI has almost always been ahead of Switzerland, Australia, Luxembourg, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and other highly rated nations. The place of the United States on this index recently slipped from seventeenth to twenty-third place.

            Lee's People’s Action Party would not have been reelected constantly if he and it had not provided unquestionably decent government and steady improvements in human wealth and human livelihoods.  Lee wanted his citizens to trade curtailments on freedom of expression and limits on how strenuously they could critique his rule -- a domineering and censorious government, but an honest one -- for a steady betterment of their human attainments and strict safety and security.  If they conformed as he demanded, the government worked for them, not for itself, and wealth and other rewards were reasonably well distributed across the population. Singaporeans could also take pride in their well-ordered life and in the esteem with which Singapore came to be regarded globally.

            Lee, now deceased, established a political culture that is thoroughly embedded in Singapore. That is why Iswaran's alleged acceptance of gifts or bribes is so shocking, despite their modest total amount. Singapore remains a monumental example of how, with clear-eyed leadership, 1) a country small or large can banish corruption and 2) can deliver strong positive outcomes of governance and wealth to its citizens. Few other countries in the world have done so much to uplift their citizens so high and with so few adverse consequences.

Two More Corruption Cases

            In South Africa, the Speaker of the lower house of Parliament, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, has been charged with accepting $135,000 in bribes (and a wig) when she was minister of defense. In Hungary, a former senior member of President Viktor Orban's ruling Fidesz Party accused the government this week of covering up a massive corruption scandal that involved releasing sex offenders from jail and has already caused Hungary's president and its justice minister to leave office. Hungary has long been regarded as the most corrupt country in Europe.