Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) became an easy target for our national and Pakatan Rakyat leaders

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) became an easy target for our national and Pakatan Rakyat leaders
when he recently commented on how
Malaysia was suffering from the effects
of its race-based politics.

Their response was typical of Malaysian
politicians from both sides of the
divide: they hurled personal insults at
the ageing Singaporean leader that
offered little insight into the real issues.

The Opposition’s Karpal Singh and Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim put it as A) mind your own business and B) your ideas are no longer
useful.

As for the Barisan Nasional, they pointed
out that Singapore is also racially biased and therefore unqualified to speak on the subject.

UMNO leaders then loudly proclaimed that the “Malays first” policy is here to stay
and that the Malays are not ready for any change. End of story.

I am reluctant to defend LKY as I think he
was heartless when he was in power and
he punished his opponents too harshly
for my liking.

However, I do admire his pragmatic approach to public policies. His strength of
conviction and willingness to be
unpopular is well known, and it was
firmly rooted in his belief that his
policies were good for the people.

Like China’s Deng Xiaoping, he favoured
policies that were practical and useful
to the general public.

Deng’s famous saying, “It doesn't matter
whether a cat is white or black, as long
as it catches mice” cleverly
encapsulated this practicality.

He understood that a market economy was
crucial for his country’s survival and
competitiveness and gradually guided
China away from the ideals of Mao Tse
Tung.

LKY took a similarly pragmatic approach when he said that Mandarin and local dialects
had to take a back seat as mastering English had to be a top priority for Singapore.

I am not an ideologue myself because
ideology seldom solves anything; in fact, I think it brings misery to its believers.

I am inclined to support anything that
works and leads to a tangible
improvement in people’s lives.

Policies that work have measurable results and are mindful of the resources that are
needed (policies that use enormous
resources and achieve few results are
simply no good).

It’s obvious to me that we need to give up
the present culture of race-based policies, not because LKY said so, but because they simply don’t work.

We need to stop doing a disservice to those
who are excluded as well as to the Malays who are supposedly the beneficiaries of these policies.

Surely 50 years is enough time for us to see
that, collectively, these policies are the mother of all that ails the country.

The simple fact is that Singapore is a first
world country today and we are third, in
whichever way we define it.

In 1965 Singapore was a small island state
that drew its revenue from small ships
anchoring at its ports and from several
thousand British Navy personnel in
Woodlands spending their money there.

There didn’t seem to be much for the island to build on but LKY did it. The world has
recognised his contribution to
transforming this third world island
into a first world metropolis. Only
Malaysian leaders do not. I call it envy.

On the other hand, Malaya and later
Malaysia started on much happier ground:
endowed with among the richest natural
resources in Asia, it had public institutions that were respected by many outside the country.

We were the success story of the
Commonwealth. Today we are a lot less
successful, whichever way we look at it.
Some say we are sliding down a slope and
picking up speed.

I am not endorsing everything that LKY and
other leaders in Singapore have done, and neither am I ignoring the differences—cultural and otherwise—between our two countries.

There are huge differences of course, but we
need to admit that in the last 50 years
we have done something wrong and they
have done something right.

There is no need to suffer from some complex about Singapore and always belittle the old man and other leaders for that
matter when they say something about us
that is less than flattering.

Shouldn’t we learn from how LKY curbed corruption and how he transformed the
communist-infested Singaporean
universities into what many consider to
be among the world’s best institutions
of higher learning?

If we are honest then we cannot possibly
deny LKY’s many achievements, and we
should be humble enough to listen to him.

I believe our Prime Minister is also a
pragmatic leader? and so I hope he will
not be discouraged from meeting his
Singaporean counterpart and LKY to
exchange views.

If our PM depends too much on Utusan
Malaysia and the old guards, then our prospects will remain dim for the next 50 years.

Then who will we blame for our failures? The Chinese I guess, if they are still
around.*

By

Datuk Zaid Ibrahim who founded
Malaysia's largest law
partnership before focusing on politics. He was a minister in the Abdullah administration, was in Umno, PKR and last in KITA as its
president.


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