Was Lee Kuan Yew really our Friend?
When people die our brains can become really fuzzy; either in the extent of our relationship with the deceased, how perfect a person he/she was, or our fictitious memories of things they said or did.
I have been to funerals where the departed was anything but all the glorious things being said about him or her. While the person is being painted as the best person since Mother Teresa, the crowd of mourners are snickering and wondering if they are at the right funeral.
Now, did someone say the late leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was their friend and they are going to miss him? Really! If Jamaica is claiming him as our friend, we must not have been very close. Friends pull on the strengths and successes of their friends. Friends have things in common. Friends may differ, but the gap is too significant not to remind everyone that, while Lee Kuan Yew was busy building a successful nation, we were equally busy institutionalising political tribalism, creating dons, building garrisons, turning a blind eye to the influx and misuse of guns, criminality and the rise of careers in worthlessness.
Derrick McKoy wrote a very astute piece on Lee Kuan Yew. In it he reminded us about what our ‘friend’ really thought about us. Lee Kuan Yew’s biography, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, reiterates our friend’s thoughts about us regarding poverty and governance.
We can say what we please about his human rights record, but he was spot on when he stood up as a man, admitted his own mistakes, and showcased Jamaica as an example of the pitfalls to avoid. In a feisty retort he said: “You know, the cure for all this talk (against his style) is really a good dose of incompetent government…” I hope in his death his words may bring us back to a reality of what Jamaica could have been.
Sandra M Taylor Wiggan
i would add to the last sentence “…..and can still be.”