As former president Masire remembers him, the late Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew was never one to bite his tongue, not when speaking about western powers and certainly not about Africans.
“He was a principled man who always spoke his mind. At the Commonwealth Summit of Heads of States and Governments, he would criticise when he felt there was need to do so. About us Africans, he said that we waste a lot of time singing and dancing, instead of attending to developments and that we are always crying about our colonial past. Why look backwards instead of forward? Masire recalls Lee saying in one of their interactions.
The part about the singing would probably have touched a raw nerve in this African man who, in his youth, had toyed with the idea of a career in music. Officiating at the inaugural Botswana Musicians Union awards ceremony in 2005, Masire said that growing up he wanted to become a musician but was discouraged by his mother who said that music was an unrewarding vocation. Coming of age though, he became a politician and decades later, would become Botswana’s second president and make the acquaintance of Lee who, at this time, was Senior Minister having stepped down as Prime Minister.
Lee may have had some unflattering, possibly justified views about Africans in general, but he certainly had soft spot for Botswana which at the time of his meeting with Masire, was enjoying Africa’s longest and one of the world’s longest economic booms. The former president says that Lee was greatly impressed with Botswana because, like Singapore, it had virtually nothing at independence and subsequently rose to become an economic powerhouse.
Whereas Botswana’s economic miracle was due to the discovery of diamonds, Singapore’s owes to a highly efficient service industry. Received wisdom is that the country has no natural resources but a case can be made that it does have one important natural resource ÔÇô the strategically placed Singapore Strait, a 105-kilometre long, 16-kilometre wide strait which provides deepwater passage to the Port of Singapore. Masire says that this strait has been critical to the country’s economic fortunes because through it, the country developed a service industry “which made the country what it is today.”
The nerve centre of this maritime trade is the Port of Singapore which is connected to over 600 other ports in 123 countries spread over six continents. It is the world’s second-busiest port in terms of total shipping tonnage. It trans-ships a fifth of the world’s shipping containers, half of the world’s annual supply of crude oil, and is the world’s busiest transshipment port. Until 2005, it was the busiest port in terms of total cargo tonnage handled.
To illustrate the efficiency of this port, Masire says that when a ship leaves Cape Town, the Singaporeans monitor its movement and by the time it drops anchor in the harbor at the Port of Singapore, “they already know all they need to do to give prompt quality service to the ship.” This efficiency is the legacy of Lee who holds the record of being the only leader in modern times to bring an entire country from Third World to First World status in a single generation.
On a trip to Singapore, Masire got to appreciate how efficient the country’s workers were. Where a Motswana factory worker would produce one shirt within a given period of time, a Singaporean counterpart would produce six within the same period.
“This was productivity not in theory but in demonstrable terms. When we say we are not productive, this is what we meant,” he recalls of this experience which would lead to Botswana benchmarking with Singapore and delegations from the two countries travelling back and forth.
As one of the Four Asian Tigers, Singapore would provide one quarter of the inspiration to establish the Botswana National Productivity Centre (BNPC). The tigers are Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Between the early 1960s and 1990s, these countries maintained exceptionally high growth rates (in excess of 7 percent a year) and rapid industrialisation . By the 21st century, all four had developed into advanced and high-income economies, with Singapore becoming a world-leading international financial centre. With the hope that this economic miracle was also possible for it, Botswana established BNPC through an act of parliament in 1993.
The Centre statutory mandate, as outlined on its website, is “to enhance the level of productivity awareness as an advocacy function and to enable individuals and organisations through training and consulting to be productive and competitive.” Sadly though, as a University of Botswana study shows, the reality is that not one productivity intervention scheme has produced the desired results and in his 2015/16 budget speech, the Minister of Finance and Development Planning, Kenneth Matambo, lamented the low levels of labour productivity in Botswana.
While laudatory about the BNPC leadership of his time as president (“quite good” is the grade he gives), Masire follows up with a quite startling assertion about Batswana’s orientation to work.
The former president has a legendary sense of humour with which he used to spice up his kgotla meetings when he was in office. Walking into the venue of the interview (the living room of his retirement home in Extension 9, Gaborone) where the writer is waiting, he is sprightly, characteristically dapper and cracks a joke after an exchange of social niceties. However, there is not a trace of mirth on his face when he says something that sounds like a joke but is actually not: Batswana’s poor work ethic is a result of their pastoralism.
“If you look at the life of pastoralists, they don’t have a good work ethic,” he says.
The example he immediately cites is that beyond sinking a borehole for their livestock, letting out cattle to pasture and doing some other undemanding work, most of the time pastoralists are just lazing about as their cattle graze untended in the bush. By the former president’s analysis, this is the work ethic that has been bequeathed to modern-day Botswana and apparently, no amount of interventions from the East will make it go south. (It was fated perhaps that Asians were never going to improve Batswana’s work ethic. The story told by Masire’s own successor, Festus Mogae at a kgotla meeting in Molepolole during his nationwide farewell tour in 2008, is that a rice farm project financed by the Taiwanese government failed because locals were not keen on learning from Asian mentors. “Each time we visited the farm we would find the Chinese working and their Batswana counterparts sitting in the shade of trees, laughing and joking that “mathaka a ga a na santhoko” [These guys don’t have gall bladders]. Whenever we visited the project, we never found Batswana working and ultimately it failed,” Mogae told the meeting. Folk legend among the Batswana is that if one is overly hardworking or has tremendous amounts of stamina, then s/he doesn’t have a gall bladder.)
Even though he accepts that BNPC “didn’t work as well as we had hoped”, Masire says that he has no regrets about establishing it and that the labour productivity problem in the country would have been a lot worse without it.
Then again, to the extent that Botswana wanted to be like Singapore, it left out one crucial element in its application of the latter’s productivity model ÔÇô autocracy. Part of Lee’s success owed to his autocracy which he was unapologetic about. The late Singaporean leader believed that autocracy was necessary to achieve economic progress and social stability. In Masire’s words, Lee’s was a “benevolent dictatorship” that was “for the benefit of his people, not his own.”
Minutes later, with a lot having been said in between, the former president likens Lee to the late Tshekedi Khama, the controversial Bangwato royal who acted as regent for Seretse Khama, Botswana’s founding president whom Masire deputised until the former’s death in 1980. Some of what Tshekedi did was disagreeable but he is widely acknowledged as having been a visionary and highly effective leader. Within this context, Masire later reaches for the most fitting Shakespearean quote: “The evil that men do lives on, the good is oft interred with their bones.”
In talking about both men and in making a general point about autocracy being desirable when it yields good results, Masire says that there are times when leaders have to be autocratic for the good of their people. While he wouldn’t equate Lee with Tshekedi, the former president says that there are similarities can be drawn between the two men.
Lee, who died last week, will be buried today and in addition to Singapore, New Zealand and India will fly their national flag at half-mast to mark his funeral.
