http://www.straitstimes.com/sites/straitstimes.com/files/20150323/ST%20Special%20Edition%20150323.pdf
One of Lee Kuan Yew's most impressive achievements:
From a recent piece in The New Yorker:
“New leaders often
condemn the venality of their predecessors, only to exceed it when they assume
office. From Duvalier, in Haiti, to Fujimori, in Peru, to Erdoğan, in Turkey,
it’s a predictable twist in the drama of political transition. But Lee
delivered on the rhetoric, enacting new anticorruption legislation and
bestowing real power on the anticorruption bureau. He raised salaries for civil
servants, to minimize any temptation to sell their influence, and instituted
harsh jail terms for those caught taking bribes. In 1986, Lee’s minister of
national development, an architect named Teh Cheang Wan, was investigated for
accepting kickbacks from two real-estate developers. He killed himself with a
fatal dose of barbiturates, maintaining, in a suicide note addressed to Lee
Kuan Yew, “It is only right that I should pay the highest penalty for my
mistake.”
By the time Lee
stepped down as Prime Minister, in 1990, Singapore had gone from being one of
the more corrupt countries on the planet to one of the least. According to
Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index,
Singapore now ranks seventh in the world for transparent government—less
corrupt than Australia, Iceland, or (by a good margin) the United States. The
story is heartening but anomalous. It is almost unheard of for a nation to
expunge a culture of corruption so thoroughly. Some countries get slightly
better, some get slightly worse, but, the world over, corruption tends to
endure.”