PM Lee Hsien Loong's condolence letter on the demise of Dr Goh
15May2010
Dear Mrs Goh,
ON behalf of the government and people of Singapore, may I convey my deepest condolences to you and your family on the passing of Dr Goh Keng Swee.
Dr Goh was a founding father of Singa-pore. He belonged to the core group of leaders who struggled against the British colonial government, fought the communists in Singapore, and stood up against the communalists while Singapore was in Malaysia. After Singapore became independent in 1965, he tackled our nation's most critical problems, and laid the foundations for our prosperity and security. Without him, the Singapore story would have been very different.
Dr Goh was both a far-sighted visionary and a pragmatic manager. He was a man of ideas, but also excelled at bringing these ideas to fruition. Whatever the challenges, Dr Goh would stay calm, bring to bear his capacious mind, work out the best course of action, and then act decisively to solve the problem.
In his 25 years in office, Dr Goh served in the most important ministries, making bold, imaginative changes to the policies and structures that now define Singapore. As Finance Minister, he initiated the industrialisation programme and set Singapore on the path of sustained development and prosperity. As Defence Minister, he introduced national service and built up the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) from scratch. As Education Minister, he totally restructured the education system, from primary schools to the universities.
In addition to the SAF, Dr Goh created and nurtured many institutions, including the Economic Development Board (EDB), Jurong Town Corporation (now called JTC Corporation), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), which have endured and become distinctive features of Singapore's structure of government. He also set out the key principles guiding many of our policies, always in pellucid and magisterial prose. The fundamental tenets of thrift and hard work, free enterprise and prudent public finance, and harmonious industrial relations continue to form the bedrock of Singapore's competitive strengths and success.
For Dr Goh, success meant more than leaving poverty behind. He believed that for a nation to grow in confidence and resilience, it needed spirit and soul. Hence he conceived and launched projects like the Jurong Bird Park, the Singapore Zoological Garden, the Chinese and Japanese Gardens, and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, for Singaporeans to relax, unwind, and develop an appreciation for the finer things in life.
In every organisation he headed, Dr Goh nurtured a culture of continuous adaptation and improvement to stay abreast of the changing world. He set high standards, and groomed and trained young officers to meet his exacting requirements.
Dr Goh strongly supported leadership renewal, a continuing imperative for Singapore. He actively pushed for the transition from the founding generation to a new, younger team of leaders who would lead Singapore to greater heights of achievement. In 1984, he himself requested to step down from Cabinet, though he remained active in many other roles, both in Singapore and abroad. What he created has endured, and become the foundation for succeeding generations to build and improve upon. However Singapore has progressed and transformed itself since Dr Goh retired, it still bears the imprint of the master builder of modern Singapore.
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DR GOH KENG SWEE, who died at the age of 91 yesterday, has been described as 'an intellectual politician,' 'a political entrepreneur,' and 'a social architect.' He was indeed an intellectual and a politician. He was also entrepreneurial in his thinking. And having served at various times as minister for finance, defence and education as well as chairman of the MAS, his thoughts and deeds had a far-reaching social impact. But Dr Goh was arguably, first and foremost, an economist who was able to harness his profound understanding of the subject and put it to work in the real world, for the betterment of people.
As finance minister in Singapore's first self-governing cabinet in 1959, he inherited a situation that he characterised as 'wretched.' Unemployment was 14 per cent, there was an acute housing shortage and reserves stood at a paltry $300 million. By the time he quit public life in 1992 (he had retired from politics earlier, in 1984), Singapore's GDP had increased by more than 11 times, manufacturing output had risen 20-fold and reserves were up more than 300-fold.
Although he had studied economic theory and continued to track new ideas in the field throughout his life, Dr Goh was disinterested in theory for its own sake. 'Governments are seldom moved by doctrines, principles, theoretical arguments and analyses which academics consider important,' he believed.
Dr Goh saw himself as a practitioner and cared most of all, for what he called 'the practice of economic growth.' He once wrote: 'A practitioner is not judged by the rigour of his logic or by the elegance of his presentation. He is judged by the results.' In his ideas and policy prescriptions he was guided as much by his knowledge as by experience, which he described as 'a harsh school in which there are no alibis for failure.'
Dr Goh's innate pragmatism and scepticism of received wisdom was translated into policy. In the 1960s, he rejected notions of 'import-substituting industrialisation' which were then fashionable among economists - the idea that countries should try to promote manufacturing by substituting for manufactured imports. He understood that this would cut off Singapore from the discipline of international competition and create vested interests among business and labour groups. Instead, he welcomed multinational corporations (MNCs), again in defiance of conventional wisdom, which viewed them as instruments of capitalist exploitation. Thus Singapore was able to industrialise quickly, tapping into best practices in technology, knowledge and management. Other countries were later to emulate the Singapore example.
While he had great respect for market forces, Dr Goh was not coy about pursuing an activist industrial policy, despite the claims of what he called 'liberal theoretical economists' that no government can foresee future economic changes and should therefore refrain from trying to pick winners. 'It would take a very obtuse economist not to have recognised that the electronics industry was in a state of dynamic expansion in the mid-1960s,' he declared. Singapore went on to leverage the electronics industry for the next four decades.
But in welcoming MNCs, Dr Goh pragmatically refrained from sticking to a target list of industries. Most were welcome. To the charge that targeting growth industries amounts to picking winners in a horse race, his reply was 'if you bet on every horse you are certain to pick the winners.'
On the crucial issue of economic growth, Dr Goh was suspicious of the prime role that economists traditionally accorded to capital investment. He also recognised that human skills and knowledge, especially technical expertise, were equally critical drivers of growth - something he also noticed in the advance of Japan, Korea and Taiwan. He viewed entrepreneurship as being important as well, although not just that of the traditional 'towkays' who built fortunes out of nothing. He recognised that even MNC managers, although paid employees, perform entrepreneurial functions, because 'they introduce a new product, or they open up a new supply of components for their parent companies.' Indeed, he believed that even state-owned enterprises could be entrepreneurial, especially when they entered areas that were previously under-invested or neglected by the private sector - a rationale for the formation of many government-linked companies in Singapore, which Dr Goh supported. However, mindful of the failings of state enterprises in many third world countries, he insisted that while government could own enterprises, it should never interfere in management. This has remained the governance model for all of Singapore's GLCs.
After retiring from politics, Dr Goh advised the Chinese government on the development of special economic zones and the promotion of tourism. He became an avid student of China's economic resurgence, and was prophetic about its prospects. As far back as 1993, he said: 'I believe China's economy can continue to grow at between 8 to 12 percent annually in most years over the next 2 decades.' He was also confident that China's economic reforms would continue. He was proved right.
As a minister, Dr Goh had his own distinctive style. For instance, he liked to see things for himself. CapitaLand CEO Liew Mun Leong, who worked with him in the Ministry of Defence, recalled in an interview with BT that he would often pick up the phone and call a line-manager or technician directly rather than go via the manager's superiors. He was also demanding, including of rigour. 'I expect every request for finance from me to be properly presented, well argued, with figures to substantiate,' he once directed.
Although an uncompromisingly tough policymaker, Dr Goh was a humanist at heart. In her vivid and insightful biography 'Goh Keng Swee: A Portrait', his daughter in law, Tan Siok Sun points out that, a classical music fan himself, Dr Goh believed that man should not live by economics alone. 'There is also a need for some soul,' he said. Thus, many of Singapore's recreational facilities and institutions - the Japanese and Chinese Gardens, the Jurong Bird Park, the Zoological Gardens, Sentosa Island, and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra were his initiatives and he persisted with them even though some of them lost money.
In fashioning an economic system virtually from scratch and building the institutions to make it work, Dr Goh was perhaps fortunate to have had the backing of an equally pragmatic and visionary prime minister. Historians will record that he and Lee Kuan Yew were a dream team. In December 1984, when Dr Goh retired from politics, Mr Lee wrote him a letter in which he is quoted to have said: 'Your biggest contribution to me personally was that you stood up to me whenever you held a contrary view. You challenged my decisions and forced me to reexamine the premises on which they were made. Thus we reached better decisions. This benign tension made our relationship healthy and fruitful.'
For all his towering achievements, Dr Goh remained modest and even retiring. He rarely sought the public eye and granted few interviews. Looking back towards the end of his life, all he allowed himself to say was 'life has been kind me in that I had this opportunity to make my contribution to Singapore's development and to lay a foundation for the next generation to build on.'
With the passing of Dr Goh Keng Swee, Singapore will mourn one of her greatest sons and the world has lost one of the most brilliant economic practitioners of his generation.
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