When cometh our LKY?
Last week, the world said goodbye to a man who made history for being the founder and builder of modern Singapore, a city state that emerged from almost nothing to a major world economic power.
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The Western countries saw Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) as an oppressive leader who terrorised his people but they could not take away from him the credit that in that uncompromising personality who did not share in the luxury of fruitless dissent was a man who was determined to change the destiny of his country and its people from poverty and backwardness to prosperity and enlightenment.
We came close to having our own LKY in the person of Osagyefo President Kwame Nkrumah who was determined to change the destiny not of just a country and its people but that of a continent and a whole race.
Maybe he set his sights too far into the unknown world, or he over-estimated his strength or under-estimated the forces that had lined up against him. In a matter of years, a combination of all the factors succeeded in halting Nkrumah in his tracks and brought to an end his ambition to make Ghana the star of Africa and in effect erase the inferiority complex from the minds of the black race.
Nkrumah was popular enough to have counted on the support of the masses without necessarily declaring a one-party state and making himself Life President. It was likely his fate and that of our country Ghana could have taken a different course if he had not moved towards the East to antagonise the powerful West.
LKY adopted a different strategy. The West claimed they did not like his politics but enjoyed and benefitted from his liberal economic policies which allowed huge and powerful multinationals to invest heavily in that country.
In the end, LKY achieved his ambition of raising the revenue to develop Singapore and change the economic status of his people (at least the majority of them) without opening the door to the avalanche of noise-making and indiscipline in the name of freedom of speech which some see as the epitome of democracy.
It was an opportunity lost and as we look back, the question many are asking is: Would we have not been better off ceding some of our so called personal freedoms for a more prosperous and enlightened country having the real freedom of living meaningfully?
We have once again got the democracy we have been yearning for and all the rights and freedoms that come with it. We can talk freely on any subject and all the mediums are available to choose from — the print media, the radio, the television and the latest—the social media.
How we are applying our newly won freedoms is the question. What do we read in the newspapers? What do we hear on the radio and what do we see on the television? What are the benefits of the social media? Are we using these platforms to galvanise ourselves into action so that we can collectively fight and eradicate poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, disease and exclusiveness that have virtually swallowed us?
We queue in the rain and sun to elect our leaders and representatives periodically as prescribed by the constitution in a democratic norm. What type of people do we choose? Do we make the choice after making fair and objective assessment of the candidates or do we make decisions driven by emotional, sentimental or ethnocentric considerations? Do we even know and appreciate the issues at stake?
Do we elect those who we know genuinely want to serve and effect a change in our destiny, or do we entrust our fate in the hands of fraudsters, vampires and marauders; people without any sense of nationalism, patriotism and compassion for the national cause but whose objective is to rape the country and strip its coffers bare?
Does democracy to us mean we can chose anyhow? Does freedom of expression mean we can use the whole day insulting each other on issues that require collective thinking, reasoning and action only to wake up to confront the same problems again?
For nearly four years we have traded insults on electricity or lack of it only to go back and sleep in the dark or close down our businesses or bury our relatives we lost because at the critical moment there was no electricity to power the life-saving equipment. Is that the price of the democracy we fought for?
Our roads are bad, the railway system is gone and there is no national carrier to fly the national flag on its wings to foreign destinations. Look at Singapore Airlines, one of the biggest in the world.
Some of us thought multiparty democracy meant multiplicity of ideas out of which will emerge a national consensus for social transformation. Are we pursuing that path? Surely, we can do better.
The people of Singapore have bid farewell to LKY but they will remember him for many years to come. We will also require more than democracy to move forward. We would require a LKY with the vision and the determination to make history as an instrument of change and social transformation and not just one of the leaders that ever lived. When cometh that one?
• fokofi@yahoo.co.uk