On 2 Sept 2009, I was one of the guests at a dinner to celebrate
the fifth anniversary of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
During the dialogue session, I asked Minister Mentor a question
about a certain possible, though not probable, political scenario
that had intrigued me for years. Suppose a freak election took
place; what would the PAP do? Would MM send in the army? By way of
softening the rather controversial nature of the question, I made
sure there was a friendly, humorous preamble. So I addressed MM
thus: ‘Some years ago I was giving a talk to some British
businessmen, giving my usual spiel about Singapore politics, civic
liberties,etc. During the question and answer session,one of the
businessmen raised his hand and said, ‘ I’ve a question, or rather
a suggestion. Why don’t you give us your Lee Kuan Yew, and we give
you in exchange our Tony Blair, with Cherie Blair thrown in?’ I
replied, ‘Mr Lee won’t like your noisy, messy, rambunctious
democracy.’ He said, ‘No matter’, and went on to remark that if
there were but five Lee Kuan Yews scattered throughout Africa, the
continent wouldn’t be in such a direful state today. After this
light-hearted sharing, I have a question: Sir, in the event of a
serious threat of a freak election, would you do the unthinkable,
that is, send in the army?’
Reproduced below is the report in The Straits Times the
following day on both my question (minus the preamble) and MM’s
answer, exemplifying, once again, the hard-headed, no-nonsense PAP
pragmatism, and the inimitable trenchancy of style that we have
come to associate with Lee Kuan Yew:
AT YESTERDAY’S dialogue, writer Catherine Lim
posed MM Lee this question: ‘Sir, in the event of a serious threat
of a freak election, would you do the unthinkable, that is,
send in the
army?’ This is an edited extract from Mr Lee’s
reply:
‘You look at our record and the moves we’ve made. Let me put it
simply like this. First, we maintain a system which gives any
opposition the opportunity to displace us peacefully. We allow the
system: we’ve not interfered with the civil service, the judiciary,
parliamentary procedures, the police and so on.
If you can win an election, so be it. If at some point we are
not able to find a team which can equal an opposition team, on that
day we deserve to be out. If we become corrupt, inefficient, can’t
deliver, we’re out.
What if we have a freak election, as we may well have? Many
voters say openly: ‘In my family, three of us voted for you but two
voted against, just to let you know that we want an opposition
voice.’ In that situation, you may have a freak result. That
worries me.
So we’ve set in place a President with blocking powers. Any
opposition that comes in will find that he cannot touch the
reserves, otherwise you can promise the sky and spend the money.
And all our hard-earned savings will go in five years.
Second, you cannot change the top officials without the
President’s consent. Any raiding of the funds must be approved by
the President who has a council of presidential advisers to advise
him yes or no.
Now, why should we do all these if we expect to overturn an
election?
We expect that if we are voted out, to stay out, and hope that
within one term, that new government, incompetent and unable to
deliver, will be out. And there’s enough core competencies and the
funds to enable a fresh PAP government to revive the system.
I spent 15 years thinking about these safeguards and finally
persuaded my younger colleagues that we needed these because they
can’t guarantee that each time they will produce a better team than
the opposition just because you’ve done so in the past.
I don’t see any problem in the next election, and probably the
election after that. But if we don’t get a good team in the
election after that and the opposition does get a good team
together, we’re at risk.
One of the first lessons I learnt in politicswas from Harold
Laski. He said if you don’t have a system that allows fundamental
change by consent, you will have a revolution by violence. If we
block all possibilities, we must expect violence. In that violence,
eventually the army won’t shoot because you are in the wrong.
That’s what happens in Africa, the army goes in and holds up the
president and often shoots him.
If we had not these thoughts at the back of our minds, why do we
do these things? Just to bluff the people? Doesn’t make sense. An
army commander, air force or police, has to be approved by a
committee and the President must agree. Why? Because we will
appoint the commanders? No, because a stupid government will do the
wrong things and when we return, we may find the whole machinery
has collapsed, as often is the case. Simple.
