The Last Fools: Eight Immortals of Lee Kuan Yew has restored somewhat my faith that the real Singapore story may yet have its full-blown Rashomon day in the sun. The book shows glimpses of possibilities, despite the fact that it is still largely a paean to eight civil servants/politicians who would easily be in the front rows of Lee Kuan Yew’s jumbo jet of 300 outstanding leadership talents he once said Singapore needed to survive.
Don’t be fooled by hyperboles – “foolhardy geniuses”, “final high priests of a wildly secular order”, “ultimate knights” – found in the book’s Introduction. George Bogaars, Andrew Chew, Hon Sui Sen, Howe Yoon Chong, Lee Ek Tieng, Ngiam Tong Dow, JY Pillay, and Sim Kee Boon were not yes-men. They did, in their own determined ways, as much for post-independent Singapore as the inner circle of first-generation political leaders – and did offer, at least for a few, the type of positive tension that LKY said existed between him and Goh Keng Swee. A couple were downright blunt, with one described as a bulldozer.
To use the title of Peh Shing Huei’s earlier book on Philip Yeo, the brash 2G economic investment czar, the eight immortals were neither always civil nor servant. Nor were they all in the same mould. This last revelation, which should not have come as a surprise, may likely get more airing with time as more books appear to put the record straight. Ex-Straits Times colleague Bertha Henson has already provided more insights into the Bogaars story with her biography, Not For Circulation: The George E. Bogaars Story. “We have to remember that the pioneer civil servants were of the same generation as the founding fathers. There might be respect, but less awe,” Henson was quoted by The Straits Times as saying. She added that they could see the failings, faults and foibles of the politicians in their bid for political control.
I hope more writers – especially younger ones – step up and do their part to provide less one-sided insights into the making of modern Singapore.
Out of The Last Fools, I learned something new. John Drysdale in Singapore: Struggle For Success, published in 1984, wrote that Lim Kim San saw the Bukit Ho Swee fire in 1961 as an opportunity to clear squatter land for redevelopment, for building Housing and Development Board flats. We have now been told in The Last Fools that, in fact, it was Howe Yoon Chong who acted on this: “Howe spied a rare opportunity. The new Chief Executive of the HDB, Singapore’s one-year-old housing authority, knew right away that it was a chance to clear one of the island’s most notorious ghettoes and build a new town. The area was a cesspool of troublemakers and secret society gangs. Government officials who were previously sent to Bukit Ho Swee to resettle squatters were beaten up…The morning (after the fire), the place was cordoned off. (Howe told HDB’s architects, that’s the land, put up a housing estate. Let’s have a plan.” Demolish first, plan later.
“Such was Howe’s efficiency that it prompted a long-running rumour that the Government had started the fire so as to build a new housing estate.”
Cleaning up the two urban rivers – Singapore River and Kallang River – was the order Lee Kuan Yew gave to Lee Ek Tieng in 1977. And he had to do that in 10 years – by 1987. I have one or two stories to tell here.
When I was a boy, I lived in a stilt house above Kallang River in Lorong 1, Geylang and waste disposal was nothing like what it is today. The river was today’s HDB rubbish bin as well as toilet. So I can appreciate Lee Ek Tieng’s under-appreciated achievement in cleaning up the two rivers.
One of the most glorious local media moments must be a TV report that I would remember for life. MediaCorp (or was it Singapore Broadcasting Corporation?) captured the river cleanup result quite remarkably. It had reporter Magdalene Lum holding a net full of flapping prawns just captured from the Singapore River. She declared, with a big smile: “The prawns are back!”
The prawns did not reappear by chance.
Neither did SIA, Keppel, Changi Airport, HDB, DBS or NEWater appear out of nowhere.
The Last Fools: The Eight Immortals of Lee Kuan Yew (edited by Peh Shing Huei) is published by The Nutgraf Books. Besides Peh, contributors are Sue-Ann Chia, Jacqueline Woo, Justin Kor, Samantha Boh, Prabhu Silvam, Aaron Low and Derek Wong.
Tan Bah Bah, consulting editor of TheIndependent.Sg, is a former senior leader writer with The Straits Times. He was also managing editor of a magazine publishing company.