Goh is the unsung hero in Singapore’s great success story economic

Opinion and Analysis

People pay their respects at the tribute area at Singapore General Hospital following the death of former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in March 23. AFP PHOTO 

By MARVIN SISSEY

In Summary

• Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew knew that economic progress lay in education and smart trade.

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” u2015 Harry S. Truman.

In my article last week, I lay ground for my considered postulation of why Kenya’s and Singapore’s economic fortunes diverged on opposite ends from their respective independence years to date.

I hypothesised that the difference in the two economies lay in the strategic contrast of the two
founding fathers, adding that only one of them had discovered in time that the pathway to economic progress lay not in resource wealth or agriculture, but in education and smart trade. I promised to explore this trajectory further this week.

We first want to identify who was behind the country’s policy frameworks on both education and smart trade.

Should Hollywood ever decide to immortalise the story of Singapore’s economic rise on the big screen, chances are that the founding father, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew will play a starring role as the brains behind the country’s fortunes. It won’t be far off the radar since as I stated earlier, he is the one who provided the overall strategic vision.

Digging deeper however, one will quickly note that the real brains behind the rise of Singapore lay elsewhere.

Dr Goh Keng Swee was a proper adherent to the Truman wisdom shared at the beginning of this article—the willingness to accomplish amazing fetes while caring less who the credit went to. It is impossible to reckon that Singapore would have an equivalent amazing story if we removed Dr Goh from the picture

(Thanks Susan Linee for pointing out to me the proper oriental surname usage after my last article) Chinese and Korean names have the patronym (father’s name) at the beginning hence it’s Dr Goh rather than Dr Swee; but I digress).

Chances are high that Dr Goh would have succeeded Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had he not been forced to retire from political office on December 3, 1984 at the early age of 66 years after he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer a year earlier.

In a tribute to mark the occasion of his retirement, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew wrote: “A whole generation of Singaporeans take their present standard of living for granted because you had laid the foundations of the economy of modern Singapore.”

Dr Goh’s Singapore story starts in 1948 when he won a scholarship at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he graduated with a BSc in Economics four years later.

It was here that Goh met fellow students seeking independence for British Malaya, including Abdul Razak (later Malaysia’s second Prime Minister), Maurice Baker (subsequently Singapore’s High Commissioner to Malaysia), Lee Kuan Yew (later Prime Minister for Singapore) and Toh Chin Chye (Dr Goh’s predecessor as the Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister.)

In 1954, Goh was able to return to LSE for doctoral studies with the help of a University of London scholarship. He completed his PhD in Economics in 1956.

In 1958, back home, he joined the People’s Action Party (PAP) and was elected a key member of the party’s Central Executive Committee and later vice- chairman. In the 1959 elections, he was successfully elected to the Legislative Assembly and was chosen by the new Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew as Minister of Finance.

That marked the beginning of his journey to steward Singapore’s economy. In his first year of office, he faced an enormous budget deficit of S$14 million.

He set the ball rolling by introducing stringent fiscal discipline which included cutting civil service salaries enabling him to announce at the end of the year when delivering the budget that the Government had achieved a surplus of $1 million. With this quick win, he won the confidence of the Prime Minister who trusted his word above all else.

In 1961, Dr Goh was the brains behind the setting up of the Economic Development Board. This is a statutory board which plans and executes strategies to sustain Singapore as a leading global hub for business and investment.

It is responsible for designing and delivering solutions that create value for investors and companies in Singapore. . The EDB was successful in attracting foreign multinational corporations to invest in Singapore.

In 1962, he started the development of the Jurong industrial estate on the western end of the island which was then a swamp, offering incentives to local and foreign business to locate there. Dr Goh admitted that the Jurong project was an ambitious act of faith with huge risks but he felt strongly that “the only way to avoid making mistakes was by not doing anything. That in itself would be the ultimate mistake.”

Dr Goh was to be instrumental in the brief merger of Singapore and the mainland Malaysia between 1963 and 1965 and equally so in the de-merger and independence of Singapore when he realised that the relationship was not working.

When Singapore got independence in 1965, it was vulnerable without an internal army. Lee Kuan Yew convinced his trusted Lieutenant Goh to relinquish his finance portfolio and become Minister for Interior and Defence— a position he served in until August 16 1967.

He assumed responsibilities for strengthening Singapore’s military and domestic security capabilities. His key policy during this period was the creation of the National Service, a mandatory conscription system for able-bodied young males.

Dr Goh was to occupy the position of Finance Minister again between 1967 and 1970 during which time he declined to allow the central bank to issue currency, favouring instead a currency board system.

He argued, correctly as it later turned out, that this would signal to citizens, academics and the financial world that governments cannot “spend their way to prosperity”.

Subsequently, in 1981, he expressed the view that the central bank need not hold large amounts of cash in reserve to defend the currency, proposing that the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) be established to invest excess reserves.

At the time, it was unprecedented for a non-commodity-based economy to have such a sovereign wealth fund.

Dr Goh was to be reappointed Minister for Defence in 1970. A year later, he put together the Electronic Warfare Study Group, a team of newly graduated engineers who had excelled in their university studies.

The group worked on Project Magpie, a secret project that is credited with developing Singapore’s advanced defence technology capabilities we know of today.

On March 1, 1973 Dr Goh was appointed Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore concurrently with his other Cabinet portfolio. In 1979, he was moved on from the Defence Ministry to the Ministry of Education where he served two terms.

Next week, we shall dissect Goh’s education and economic policies in detail.