RICH STATE, POOR STATE OP-ED
Lessons from Singapore — if we know how to develop faster, why don’t we do it?
Dozens of African delegations visit Singapore every year to learn from the island’s success in transforming from a (real) per capita GDP of $4,214 to $67,360 since its independence in 1965. During this same period, sub-Saharan Africa’s per capita GDP has gone from $1,259 to $1,623.
Following her first visit to Singapore in March 2017, the then premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, found herself in a media storm over her comments on colonialism. She had tweeted that, while colonialism had been an oppressive and evil system, judging from the success of Singapore, not every consequence had been negative. The result was rapidly manufactured outrage as the ANC’s Twitterati created a storm.
So great was the squall that Zille was disciplined by her party for bringing it into disrepute. Despite Zille apologising “unreservedly” for the tweet, the then leader of the Democratic Alliance, Mmusi Maimane, said that the premier had “agreed that it is in the best interests of the party for her to vacate her position on all decision-making structures”.
The effect of the media scrum on this one aspect — Zille’s views on the relative merits and demerits of colonialism — were unhelpful in drawing attention away from the key present issue in Africa of which myriad government study tours to Singapore remind us: If we know what to reform to improve development prospects, why don’t we do it?
The polymarble statue of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was erected on the Singapore quayside in 1972, on the spot where the man considered the founder of modern Singapore is believed to have landed 150 years earlier. The white statue is a copy of the original bronze figure now just a short stroll away in front of the Victoria Memorial Hall. Sculpted by the renowned English artist and poet Thomas Woolner, the bronze edition was unveiled on Jubilee Day, 27 June 1887.
Lessons for Africa
Dozens of African delegations visit Singapore every year to learn from the island’s success in transforming from a (real) per capita GDP of $4,214 to $67,360 since its independence in 1965. During this time, sub-Saharan Africa’s per capita GDP has gone from $1,259 to $1,623.
Whereas Singapore’s share of global per capita GDP has increased from slightly below the global norm of $4,257 in 1965 to now being six times greater than the 2022 average of $11,315, sub-Saharan Africa’s share has halved to just 14% in the intervening six decades.
Singapore’s GDP is, at $380-billion, now slightly more than South Africa’s, though its population is ten times smaller. In 1965, South Africans were, on average, 10% wealthier than Singaporeans.
It’s not as if the costs of the failure to follow a similar reformist path to Singapore go unnoticed by African leadership.
Raila Odinga was the Prime Minister of Kenya from 2009 to 2013. Before and during that time he headed Kenyan delegations to study Singapore’s success.
“It seems extraordinary today that in the 1960s Singapore looked to Africa for insight on growing its economy,” he recalls. “In 1968, a team of Singaporeans came to Kenya to learn our lessons, since we were then a more developed country than they were. Four decades later I led a study trip to Singapore with six ministers. That was the latest in many trips taken by the Kenyan government to the island, about which no report was ever written, and where the participants kept everything to themselves.
“This, I am sure, is the depressing experience of many an African government official and politician. Lots of studies, followed by much less in the way of action.”
Tough decisions and sound leadership
There are many good lessons to be extracted from Singapore, not least embracing the past, but also the willingness to make tough decisions and maintain attention to detail, which require a combination of sound leadership and a highly capable, meritocratic civil service.
Strength in diversity — Raffles meets Asia at Victoria Memorial Hall. (Photo: Greg Mills)
Corruption is severely punished, contrary to most African and other Asian political economies, and fundamentally, (economic) growth matters. If, for example, Africa had increased its wealth at the rate of Vietnam, which had a difficult passage to independence, it would be touching the global average instead of being seven times less.
And if Africa had grown at the pace of Singapore, Africans would be twice as wealthy as the global average.
If there is one key lesson to be taken out of Singapore, it’s about pragmatism in running a government.
It’s not about the need for more time, since most African countries have been independent for longer than Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew might have been prime minister for three decades, but his duration was long because delivery was impressive. If the latter had been poor, it is doubtful LKY would have lasted, no matter his authoritarian tendencies.
Geography and the neighbourhood have helped, but it was not so for a long time — there was a time when the region was defined by wars, from Korea to Vietnam. China’s poor performance was a blight for the first 40 years of the existence of the People’s Republic.
It’s also not because Singapore managed to stay out of the clutches of nasty multinationals: on the contrary, Singapore has actively gone out to attract these businesses into the country, given their role in introducing skills, technology, finance and, crucially, knowledge and practice of markets. The number of multinationals has been a key and longstanding metric of success.
It’s not because of the relative absence, either, of neo-colonialism, however that may be defined, since the US and the West have maintained a steady presence since 1945. Again, the role of Western companies and countries has been actively encouraged, on Singapore’s terms.
Why, when we know how Singapore among others did it and where the island came from, do African (and other) leaders choose to (largely) ignore its lesson of the need for leadership at every level, including the need for a highly professional civil service?
Several reasons stand out.
For one, as Barry Desker has suggested, “Africans may relativise Singapore’s experience and over-emphasise the situational and contextual (cultural, historical, environmental, etc) differences. Those who visit Singapore conclude that it is a small place, easy to govern!” says the veteran Singaporean civil servant.
Africans may not feel the same existential threat that Singapore did in 1965 on the breakup of the Malaya Federation, believing that even without reforms, their relative size and natural resources allow them to get away without making tough, far-reaching reforms. As such, their preferred ignorance is a defensive reflex to exonerate their own inability to adopt similar strategies.
Local role models
Yet such an existentialism is rising as the business-as-usual premise of most African leaders in the face of a galloping demography rings hollow. It’s one thing to kick the reform can down the road with a billion mouths to feed in Africa, another with 2.5 billion, the projected population in 2050. The rash of instability currently in the Sahel offers a window into the dystopian consequences of inaction.
If the premium of development is on what Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian head of state (full disclosure: we wrote a book together on Asia and he is The Brenthurst Foundation’s emeritus chair) has identified as “transformational, focused, courageous and determined” leadership, the question is, how to encourage it down this path?
Ironically, the answer lies in having local role models of the sort that Singapore provides for others in the region, just as Japan provided earlier for the Asian Tigers’ reforms.
Under Deng Xiaoping China learnt from Singapore the need for skills and the benefits of openness. (Photo: Greg Mills)
This aspect is personified just 100m down from the Raffles statue along the Singapore River in the bust of Deng Xiansheng, the original name of Deng Xiaoping, considered the father of modern China.
Unveiled by Lee Kuan Yew and then Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping in 2010 in celebration of the 20th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Singapore and China, the memorial features a quote by Deng: “Development is of overriding importance” in laying out Deng’s accomplishments and detailing his early life, political activities, his (only) visit to Singapore in November 1978, and his role in Singapore-China relations.
Deng was the first senior Chinese leader to visit Singapore. His 1978 visit spurred subsequent interactions in various fields between the two countries. The same year he initiated his dual policies of economic reform and openness. Following his famous “southern tour” in 1992 when he referred to Singapore’s good social order and management, many Chinese officials were sent to the island for training, illustrating that even the largest, most complex societies could, with a necessary dollop of political direction, adopt lessons from the smallest.
Deng is remembered as one of the great modern statesmen, the architect of China’s economic transformation through reform. Despite remaining a staunch communist, his reforms were notable for their pragmatism — of socialism with Chinese characteristics — best captured in his words: “It does not matter if it is a yellow cat or a black cat as long as it catches mice.” He was proved right and with the unleashing of the power of the market to allocate resources, China engineered the greatest economic turnaround in modern times.
Heroes of development are important. While Raffles’ legacy remains complex and, in some quarters, controversial, his role reminds us of the necessity to take the best out of the past to make progress in the future.
His arms folded, his back to a spectacular skyscraper skyline, Stamford Raffles would be stunned at Singapore’s transformation from a malaria-ridden swamp with a 150-strong population to a six-million-person $400-billion economy.
Today, his gaze ironically focuses on the Asian Civilisations Museum, a reminder that the island-state’s history did not start, and will not end, with his role. Rather, Raffles is mostly accepted and celebrated among Singaporeans, given the paucity of unifying and historical figures in that multicultural society.
From a South African perspective, the question is thus less about the past and the extent to which it is allowed to imprison views on the future, than about the present state of reforms.
One wonders if a big church like the ANC, whose leading members have a narrow but deeply entrenched interest to preserve the status quo, has the capacity either to self-correct and transform itself or to emphasise unifying figures when there is more seemingly to be gained in the short term from identity politics and division, even if development is the purpose of political power and of overriding importance. DM
The author of Rich State, Poor State, Dr Mills is at www.thebrenthurstfoundation.org and writes from Singapore.
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Perhaps I missed a subtlety in the article, or perhaps the article missed a crucial point? Singapore was picked up by its bootstraps because the man running it was a benign dictator, 100%. No actual democracy at all.
Apologies to Greg Mills – there is a reference to the Singaporean leader’s “authoritarian tendencies” tucked away in the article, very underplayed. What the article should be doing is highlighting the benevolent dictatorship as the cornerstone of its development – the rest all follows later down the line
South Africa could never emulate Singapore. There is a completely different work ethic between the mostly Chinese Singapore inhabitants and the indigenous inhabitants of SA. But more than this, and most importantly, the leaders of SA simply do not want this country to flourish. They don’t want to uplift the population. They have demonstrated over the last thirty years a complete disregard for “their people” preferring to enrich the few rather than the many. It’s like the story of the scorpion and the frog. It’s in their nature.
Great analysis! As pointed out by an earlier government minister from those parts, the route-to-success at it’s simplest for any nation is MPH ……Meritocracy, Pragmatism and Honesty.
Here in SA they would rather cut out the messenger’s tongue, as Ms Zille found (and Andre de Ruyter) …..cadre deployment, bullet trains and endemic corruption the default option.
We’re a failed state, but not a failed society fortunately…….there are many saffers that practice MPH in our day-to-day lives, bring on the elections and consolidate the pushback!
While I totally respect Dr Mills and his forthright analyses, it is implausible to compare the two cultures. My company’s Far East HQ was based in Singapore during the transition decades and, while LKY ruled with an iron rod, much was destroyed to create a densely populated work obsessed society. Certainly financially and materially wealthy but with as much allure as Dubai or Monaco.
Developing a country requires sacrifice. At least one generation must sacrifice it’s right to happiness and soft life. Africa, especially in SA, there is this obsession with soft life. Champagne life, Dubai trips, no one wants to roll up their sleeves and build stuff. It is a shame that we had founding fathers like Oliver Tambo and Madiba who sacrificed their lives to spend decades on the trenches of the struggle for liberation to liberate people who just don’t want to sacrifice their happiness and build banks, farms, ports, and dams. Dubai is just a city in the middle of the desert but SA is a country in the bottom of Africa where your umbilical cord is buried
The answer to the question is pretty simple. SA is in the hands of a bunch of totally incompetent, patently corrupt pathological liars who have no interest in the country or its people as they are totally focused on lining their own pockets at any cost.
Sloth, incompetence, greed(corruption, crime) and bad ideology. These are the 4 attributes (??) that define the ANC. I think it was the Singapore prime minister who used the acronym to descfribe its success: MPH. Merit, Performance and Honesty, all of which are completely absent in the ANC. So yes, the ANC cannot possibly succeed. It could succeed if it adopted these 4, but largely by choice it won’t.
As an economic historian whose postgraduate work focused on compared to post-colonial development, I fully agree with the skeptics below. Mills waves away the “situational and contextual (cultural, historical, environmental, etc) differences” as though they are simply excuses, but they are absolutely critical. Singapore has always been one of the most important Geopolitical locations on the planet because of its location at the choke point between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Part of the reason the Singapore left the Malay Federation was encouragement by Western countries who preferred having a malleable pro-Western government in control. Lee Kuan Yew’s autocratic rule was not only tolerated, but positively encouraged by the US and Britain. It’s no surprise that the Chinese respected his model, because it is identical to their own- economic growth in exchange for the loss of freedom.
Besides the vastly different context at independence, there’s a world of difference when it comes to attracting capital to a tiny city state with a pristine geopolitical location and a continent full of countries with little domestic capital resources to speak of. Yew’s government simply forbade any resistance to reinviting western capital back into the city state, something exceedingly difficult to do in the immediate postcolonial African context. And with the vast majority of the population, including the political class, shorn of any access to capital, corruption is the inevitable result.
Mills’ is pure wishful thinking. But he is not alone. The ANC would dearly love to emulate the Singapore model, because it would justify a brutal crackdown on freedom of speech and other liberties on the excuse that that’s what it takes to grow a country’s GDP. As they say, you can tell a person by the company they keep.
At the end of the 2nd World war, Singapore was just fetid swamp land, and Changi, where the present air is, an old POW camp. Initially Singapore became part of Malaysia, but LKW could see that their Bumiputera policies (Malay BEE and cadre deployment of Malays) was a road to nowhere, and thus, against most then advice, LKY, after a plebiscite, pulled Singapore out, to go solo.
Singapore was NOT the then favoured entrepot, there were many other possibles, and most believed those within Malaya or Indonesia, given their hinterlands and populations, were far more likely to succeed.
Eschewing the BEE and cadre deployment, utilising ALL the skills, and ACTUALY carrying out their successive 5yr plans, meant that Singapore soon left far behind those who believed in the Bandung model (which South Africa of course took as it’s blueprint.).
The past doesn’t have to be our prison, and lively, intelligent, thinking, agile minds, will always outpace ponderous one-party statism. Isn’t THAT one of the key lessons of history?
Looking at some of the responses harking back to history, I guess the real question is whether we wish to allow the past to keep us captive and define our future by repeating the mistakes and faults of it, or even worse, trying to address the wrongs of the past by implementing the mirror image of it?
Change is inevitable. The nature, pace, and outcome of that change is in our hands and future generations will judge us on the impact made by those outcomes or lack of it.
Posting a comment at 12h56 and it not being available by 15h00 is unacceptable.
The Singaporean population is multi-cultural, but rather than, as in South Africa, ensuring that only one ethnic group is encouraged, supported and enabled to be employed, Singapore has an open society that allows ALL, to work and contribute. This is the key lesson, not that LKY was a benign dictator.
Of course this meant that the Chinese portion of the population were the main drivers, owners of the economy, but because this enabled ALL members of society to benefit and participate in the growing economy, society powered ahead, and full employment achieved, giving opportunities for ALL.
Contrast this with our economy, where the major thrust, arguably the ONLY thrust, is on redistribution; handicapping the most able, and actively ensuring the employment of the LEAST able.
At the time of Ms Zille’s castigation for lauding the Singaporean model for development, Ms Zille had just visited, at their National Art Gallery, a stand enabling everyone to see the various 5-yr development plans, their achievements, the way the recognised their constraints, water shortages etc, and how plan-by-plan, over 50yrs, these were overcome, shooting past South Africa.
Contrast this with Ebrahim Patel’s total and abject failure to see through even 5% of each plan’s objective and our inability to learn from his, the ANC’s and thus our collective experiences – palpable proof of the old adage of only a fool, bashing his head against the wall, time after time, and expecting a different result.
Presumably a moderator will read this. I posted on this forum at 12h56. It is now 17h00 and my comment has not yet been approved. thisis (again) unacceptable. The Daily Maverick is a victim of its own success; it is now too big, too impersonal, and simply takes its paying readers (Maverick Insiders) for granted. Any attempt to get a response from your editorial staff is met with, at best, a blandishment. Enough said.
I am trying to figure what is Mills point. Is he saying the Head of ruling party (ANC) should suspend the SA and ANC constitution and rule by decree. To create a society like Singapore we would have to start like them with forced integration . It worked there because the majority of the population were expats ( Chinese , Indian, British ) the indigenous Malay population were a minority .
African politcians only look at something to how they alone will benefit from.
Apartheid is very much alive in South Africa, the Rich corrupt ANC cadres and the deliberately made poor controlled by unemployment and government grants.