If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, corruption must be among its most ancient vices. Ever since the first Neanderthal figured out that he could secure a better spot in the cave by giving his chief an extra big slab of mastodon meat, corruption has been a constant feature of human organization. And unlike some of the other problems discussed in this book, it probably always will be—at least until humans evolve into a higher life-form.
In the meantime, no matter where you live, you’re likely accustomed to seeing signs of corruption all around you. The revelations never seem to stop. In February 2014, for example, the Asian media were full of stories about Edwin Yeo, a high-ranking official who’d been busted for stealing some $1.4 million in public money to fund his extravagant gambling habit. Superficially, Yeo’s case looked all too familiar, but one thing made it unusual: the country where it occurred. Yeo was from Singapore, where he worked (ironically) for the city-state’s anticorruption agency. Yeo was also the first of his colleagues to be charged with such malfeasance in twelve years. That’s not because Singapore usually overlooks such crimes—it’s because they almost never take place there.
Singapore has come closer to eradicating corruption altogether than just about any other country. In 2014 Transparency International ranked it the least corrupt state in all of Asia and seventh in the world. And that’s typical. Singapore has scored near the top of the rankings every year since the watchdog first started compiling them, in 1995.
What makes Singapore’s record especially striking is that it didn’t start out as a paragon of clean government—anything but. And that makes it a particularly good model for other places trying to clean up their acts (unlike, say, virtuous Sweden, which beats Singapore on Transparency International’s league tables but which has been a constitutional democracy for more than two hundred years).
When Singapore first won home rule from Great Britain in 1959, the city was famous not for its incorruptibility but for its debaucherous embrace of vice and iniquity. Not for nothing was the place known as “Sin-galore.” Chinese triads and secret societies openly operated scores of opium dens and bawdy houses, and their henchmen fought turf wars in the streets. The British Military Administration, which ran the place after World War II, had been so notoriously venal that most locals referred to it as the “Black Market Administration.” And Singapore’s bureaucrats, especially its police, were hopeless; a 1949 Colonial Office report referred to them as “an ill-clad, badly equipped and poorly disciplined rabble.” Things were so bad the year Singapore first became self-governing that, if you were unlucky enough to get hit by a car on its chaotic streets, you’d have to pay off the ambulance crew before they’d take you to a hospital.
All that helps explain why, when a prominent young barrister known as Harry Lee decided to run for prime minister that year, he resolved to make corruption the focus—indeed, the obsession—of his campaign.
Harry had been born Lee Kuan Yew to a middle-class Singapore Chinese family in 1923. Obviously brilliant, he’d distinguished himself early as a star pupil, excelling at the prestigious Raffles Institution (an independent British-style high school) and dreaming of attending university in the United Kingdom. But in 1942 the Imperial Japanese Army had swept into town, dashing Harry’s hopes and dealing the British one of their sharpest setbacks of the war. Like many Singaporeans, Lee survived the hard years of occupation by learning Japanese and scrounging a living on the black market (he specialized in pawned jewelry).
The Japanese were brutal overlords and the city suffered mightily under their rule. Just when it seemed like life would never improve, however, Tokyo surrendered, and on September 2, 1945, the war was over. Singapore was quickly liberated—which meant, among other things, that Lee could finally sail for England. On arrival in the imperial capital, Harry dove into student life at the London School of Economics, where he was swept up in the heady anticolonialism and Fabian socialism of the day; among his tutors was the same Harold Laski who would make such a big impression on the young Pierre Trudeau. One year later, Lee transferred to Cambridge, where his brothers were also studying, to read law.
After scoring a rare double first on his finals, Harry returned to Singapore in 1950, where he resumed his given name, entered private practice, and remarried the woman he’d secretly wed in England three years earlier. On the day of their second nuptials, the British registrar they’d hired for the ceremony made the grave error of arriving fifteen minutes late. Incensed, the groom—betraying the extreme intolerance for inefficiency that would soon make him famous—proceeded to berate the hapless civil servant.
Though Lee proved good at the practice of law, private life left him feeling restless. Bored with his commercial cases and infuriated with the island’s complacent and incompetent colonial administrators, he got involved first in the labor movement and then in local politics, and in 1954 he and some friends founded the People’s Action Party (PAP). Apart from pushing for independence from Great Britain, the PAP would make fighting corruption one of its top concerns when it ran in the country’s first free legislative elections in 1959.
Choosing clean government as a campaign theme was a risky proposition at the time. After all, corruption wasn’t just commonplace in the Singapore of that era; it was ubiquitous. As Lee himself would write some years later, “the percentage, kickback, baksheesh, slush, or whatever the local euphemism, [was] a way of life in Asia: People openly accept[ed] it as part of their culture.”
Attempts to change such deeply ingrained habits usually flop. Yet Lee and his comrades were determined to try, for several reasons.
First, they recognized that graft had so thoroughly infected and enfeebled their island’s institutions that it risked poisoning the fledgling state before it ever got off the ground.
Second, casting the PAP as a band of arch–corruption fighters gave the party a handy way to distinguish itself from the island’s other political factions, which Lee denounced as “supine, feeble, self-serving, [and] opportunistic.” During the campaign, the PAP even accused members of its main rival, the Singapore People’s Alliance, of taking payoffs from foreign powers. Focusing on corruption also helped Lee outflank the island’s powerful communist movement, which had made the issue its cause as well.
The strategy ended up working brilliantly. On May 30, 1959, the PAP won the election and an exultant Lee—then just thirty-five years old—suddenly found himself Singapore’s first prime minister. Never one for understatement, he declared the results “a victory of right over wrong, clean over dirty, righteousness over evil.”
It was a triumphant moment. Yet as Lee surveyed his new domain, he quickly discovered that, politics and moralizing aside, there was another, even more pressing reason to push for sweeping reform: the city was in desperate shape.
As a colony, Singapore had been important; thanks in part to its enormous port, “the Gibraltar of the East” had been Britannia’s key administrative, commercial, and military outpost in the region. But as the British Empire receded, Singapore quickly sank into poverty and obscurity, becoming what Raj Vasil, author of several books on the country, called just another “undeveloped country of the Third World.” In 1965, after a brief and unhappy union with its big sibling, Malaysia, Singapore became fully independent. The new country was tiny, with just 1.58 million people crammed onto a landmass about half the size of New York City. Its population—split uneasily between ethnic Chinese, Tamils, Malays, and whoever else had washed up on the territory’s shores—was diverse and divided. An island, Singapore had almost no freshwater. And unlike Malaysia, the country had no sizable markets or industry to build on and no commodities or other natural resources to exploit.
As a result, conditions at independence were grim. Per capita GDP was just $443. Unemployment was high and, with the population growing fast, rising; Albert Winsemius, Lee’s chain-smoking Dutch economic adviser, warned that it could top 14 percent by 1966. Most Singaporeans were poorly educated, and half of them lived in squalid slums. The place was a malarial swamp, and everything seemed to be getting worse fast. As Winsemius warned his boss, “Singapore is walking on a razor’s edge.”
Rather than lament these circumstances, however, Lee realized that they offered him, and Singapore, a tremendous opportunity. His breakthrough insight, which would lay the foundation for his country’s many eventual accomplishments, was that Singapore’s poverty of resources could be turned into an asset—by giving its leaders the freedom to think and act radically. The one thing newly independent Singapore could offer, he reasoned, was good governance. Singapore needed to industrialize to survive, and that meant attracting lots of foreign investment. If Lee could enshrine the rule of law and what he called “First World standards of reliability and predictability” in a corner of the world utterly lacking in them, it might just give the city-state a comparative advantage—and a fighting chance.
Lee therefore set out to create a nation “different from our neighbors: clean, more efficient, more secure,” as he put it. Spurred on by desperation—as Lee said, without rapid reform, “then verily shall we perish”—he moved fast. Just days after he was sworn in, dressed in white to symbolize his purity, he launched what the political scientist Robert Rotberg calls an “absolute jihad” against bribery and graft, constructing one of the most effective and comprehensive anticorruption systems the world has ever seen.
Lee started by building on one of the few positive legacies the departing British had bequeathed him: Singapore’s Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB), which the colonial government—having been badly embarrassed by a particularly egregious case of police malfeasance in 1951—had been forced to create a few years earlier. (The story had involved the theft of eighteen hundred pounds of opium by a gang that included several dirty cops.) The original CPIB was tiny and relatively toothless, however, so Lee set about enhancing its powers.
The Prevention of Corruption Act (POCA), which his new government passed in June 1960, did this in several ways. First, it defined corruption very broadly: as the giving of virtually anything of value (which the law calls “gratification”) in exchange for any sort of benefit from the government. Gratification could be monetary, taking the form of gifts, loans, fees, rewards, commissions, or release from a debt; or it could be something nonmonetary, such as property, a job, or “any other service, favour, or advantage of any description whatsoever.” The law even criminalized bribe paying within the private sector to cover cases where no government officials were involved.
Second, the POCA created several powerful new legal presumptions. These included permitting the CPIB to treat the mere fact that an official was living beyond his or her means, or had assets that he or she couldn’t properly account for, as prima facie evidence that the official was on the take. The law also put the burden of proof on any government worker who received a gift to establish that it had come with no strings attached, and that the recipient hadn’t returned the favor in any way.
Third, the new legislation granted the CPIB great independence, giving it the power to investigate, search, and arrest suspects all on its own, without having to rely on the country’s untrustworthy police. A few years later, Singapore’s legislature also granted the CPIB the ability to force witnesses to testify. And to free the agency from meddling by politicians, the bureau was removed from the attorney general’s supervision in 1969 and placed in the prime minister’s office. (Since this move created the theoretical opportunity for the prime minister himself to manipulate the CPIB, the rules were amended again some years later to give Singapore’s directly elected president the right to overrule the prime minister in such a case.)
To show how the bureau would actually work and to send the message that, as Lee put it, “the disinfecting has to start from the top,” the new government went after some high-profile targets, including a few of the prime minister’s close friends. Thus in 1966, for instance, the bureau targeted an old Lee crony named Tan Kia Gan, who was then serving as Singapore’s director on the board of Malaysian Airways and whom investigators suspected of taking bribes to favor a particular aircraft supplier. (Though Tan’s coconspirators refused to testify against him, making a conviction impossible, Lee fired and ostracized him anyway.) In 1975 Wee Toon Boon—a comrade of Lee’s from their trade union days, then serving as minister of state for the environment—was sent to prison for accepting gifts from a property developer. And Teh Cheang Wan, another Lee ally who’d become minister for national development, was investigated in 1986 for taking bribes. Rather than face trial, Teh wrote a note announcing, “As an honourable oriental gentleman, I feel it is only right that I should pay the highest penalty for my mistake”—and took a deadly overdose of sleeping pills. Even Lee’s own family would come to be investigated after he left office, though all his relatives were exonerated.
As intended, these and other prominent inquiries sent a powerful message to Singapore’s public, gradually rewriting the permissive cultural values that the PAP had so deplored. As K. Shanmugam, the country’s minister for law, put it to me when we met in his office on a steamy September morning not long ago, because Lee was “completely incorruptible, and chose people who were incorruptible, and when they strayed, he came down hard, that became an internalized norm.” Ordinary folk, Rotberg explains, quickly came to appreciate “that the governing elite were not routinely (as elsewhere) taking advantage of their official positions to enrich themselves….That robust message had its impact on lesser officials”—and on the public at large.
Even jihads can take time to accomplish, however, so Singapore has continued to refine its anticorruption system in the decades since independence. The CPIB has been greatly expanded: an organization that had just 8 staffers when Lee took power in 1959 now has 177, and its budget, which was barely a million Singapore dollars in 1978, has since increased by almost 5,000 percent.
The government has also developed an extremely large toolkit for detecting wrongdoing. For instance, today police officers are required to report whatever petty cash they have in their pockets at the beginning and the end of each shift; those found with more than they started out with are assumed to have taken a bribe. CPIB inspectors regularly troll racetracks looking for any official who seems to be throwing around too much money and require civil servants to declare visits to casinos. The agency has also made it extremely easy for ordinary citizens to report suspected payoffs (anonymously, if they wish) via the CPIB’s website and its twenty-four-hour toll-free hotline.
To be effective, of course, deterrence requires punishment, not just detection. Singapore has thus frequently increased the penalties facing anyone still reckless enough to break the rules. Today those convicted of corruption can face lengthy prison terms and fines of up to S$100,000 (US$70,000); they’re also forced to pay back the bribe. The government has even started punishing the supervisors of corrupt officials: after Yeo was nabbed in February 2014, for example, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong formally reprimanded his boss and reassigned the CPIB’s director.
Political scientists distinguish between two types of corruption: the “petty” or “lubricating” sort (which involves paying a small sum to a low-level official to encourage him or her to issue a passport, say, or a vending permit), and the “administrative” or “grand” kind, which occurs at the national level and can involve the purchase of construction tenders, import permits, or a contract to supply the state with tanks or telephone lines. Singapore makes no such distinction and goes after both types with equal zeal, differentiating between them only in the sanctions it imposes. So while an official at the Singapore Land Authority got twenty-two years in 2011 for skimming some S$12.5 million (US$8.7 million) from the public purse, the next year another Singapore resident was fined S$3,000 (US$2,093) for offering a S$40 (US$27) bribe to a street cop.
Tough as it is on malefactors, the government prefers to avoid resorting to punishment and so has crafted various means of encouraging citizens not to stray in the first place. Well-funded educational and public outreach programs extend all the way down to the elementary school level, and the CPIB even runs slickly produced trailers (tagline: “Don’t Stray. Corruption Never Pays.”) before Hollywood movies in cinemas. The government also rewards officials who reject bribes by giving them public commendations and cash bonuses.
To reduce bureaucrats’ temptation to supplement their incomes, Singapore’s government has gradually increased their pay, such that it now compensates its officials more generously than virtually any other state in the world. Civil servants get a range of cushy benefits, from golf club memberships to discounted vacation packages, and their compensation is pegged to two-thirds the prevailing wage for equivalent private-sector work. New government ministers can earn about S$935,000 (US$650,000) a year—almost twice what the US president takes home. The state also regularly rotates its employees into new posts to prevent them from developing cozy relationships with the public, and it has eliminated whole classes of fees and tariffs (such as import duties) to reduce the amount of cash that passes between the public and officials. Finally, it has worked hard to take money out of politics—the source of so much corruption in so many other places, including the West—by imposing strict spending limits, keeping elections very short (they generally last only nine days), and banning political ads.
As Singapore’s stratospheric cleanliness rankings attest, this multifaceted system has paid off handsomely. Lee’s “First World standards,” along with a host of other good governance initiatives, have turned this once nearly destitute city into a world-beating economy. In 2015 the World Bank named Singapore the easiest place on the planet in which to do business. The country now boasts a $300 billion economy, which is slightly larger than that of the Philippines (a nation with about ninety million more citizens). In per capita purchasing-power terms, Singapore is now the world’s sixth-richest country. Not bad for a state that got such a rocky start barely fifty years ago.
Still, this book is about role models, not just success stories, and so it’s important to acknowledge that—despite Singapore’s many accomplishments—its record comes with several asterisks.
First, some analysts, such as Simon Tay (a law professor and former MP who now chairs the Singapore Institute of International Affairs), warn that the country may have done too good a job fighting corruption, if such a thing is possible. Tay worries that complacency is setting in. As he told me over tea in his high-rise office above Singapore’s Orchard Road, “the government feels that, having hired the right people and inculcated the right values, they no longer have to watch themselves. And I think there are a lot of signs”—such as the recent Yeo case—“that they still do have to watch themselves.” Another former senior official (who asked for anonymity given the sensitivity of the subject) suggested that while the current administration is indeed beyond reproach when it comes to many formal types of corruption, it has a big blind spot when it comes to at least one less formal sort: nepotism. It’s surely no coincidence, for example, that the current prime minister happens to be Lee Kuan Yew’s oldest son.
Real as these problems are, however, they are relatively good ones for a country to have. Few people question the younger Lee’s competence. And the frantic housecleaning the CPIB performed after the embarrassment of the Yeo trial suggests the government hasn’t started resting on its laurels just yet. (After another CPIB scandal in 1997, the agency’s then director ordered his entire staff, including himself, to take polygraph tests.)
A second, more serious question about the applicability of the Singapore model stems from the country’s idiosyncrasies. It is unusually rich, and, with a tiny landmass and just 5.5 million inhabitants, unusually small. Both those attributes offer it advantages that bigger, poorer neighbors like China, India, and Indonesia—which would like to follow Singapore’s lead—don’t enjoy.
The issue of wealth is easy to dismiss. Though Singapore is very rich today, it wasn’t when it first declared war on corruption—yet its poverty didn’t prove an insurmountable impediment. And while the country does use its money to help keep clean these days—by paying government employees extremely well and generously funding anticorruption efforts—the high salaries and big budgets are fairly recent developments, which suggests that fighting corruption needn’t be an expensive undertaking. Lee actually reduced government pay during the early, lean years of his tenure, yet corruption declined anyway due to the legal strictures he put in place.
Singapore’s small size represents a thornier problem. Jon S. T. Quah, a former professor at the National University of Singapore and a world-renowned corruption expert, has documented how the country’s microscopic geography made communications and administration unusually straightforward, especially in the predigital age. It’s also much easier to oversee a small, unitary bureaucracy than a huge federal one. Still, Quah and other experts argue that even big, administratively complex countries like India could follow Singapore’s path if they started on a limited scale—launching programs on the local or state level and only expanding them outward after they’d proved successful there. When Narendra Modi, now India’s prime minister, was chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, he managed to cut corruption significantly, which shows how committed leaders can make a difference. Though it won’t be easy, there’s no necessary reason he or other like-minded politicians can’t replicate such success on a national level.
The third problem with the Singapore model is the hardest to dismiss. Clean, honest, efficient, and successful as it is, the country is no liberal democracy. Although Lee first won office in a free election, he tolerated only token opposition during his subsequent decades in power, and used a variety of sometimes brutal means to enforce his writ and keep his enemies weak and off guard. During a valedictory 2010 interview, he admitted to having done “some nasty things” during his long reign (though he insisted they’d all been done for “honorable purposes”). And during the 1990s, he became infamous for promoting the “Asian Values” thesis—which holds that Confucian societies are culturally unsuited to the messiness of political pluralism and should be content to be led by elites—to justify his rule.
Lee resigned from Singapore’s top job in 1990, gave up his last residual title (Minister Mentor) in 2011, and died in 2015. And his country has slowly edged closer toward real democracy in recent years. Yet advocacy groups continue to criticize its restrictions on opposition parties, the media, and the right to assembly; despite years of nominal reforms, Freedom House, the US-based human rights monitor, still ranks the country as only “Partly Free.”
Such concerns might diminish the appeal of Singapore’s corruption-fighting strategy for other, more enlightened countries. They shouldn’t. Although Lee’s reliance on repression is unpleasant to contemplate, it wasn’t a core part of the country’s cleanliness campaign. Indeed, most of the city-state’s tactics in that battle could work just as well in a nonauthoritarian setting.
It’s true that a few of Singapore’s corruption-fighting methods—like its occasional detention of suspects without speedy trial—clash with Western norms of fairness and due process. But the bulk of the system—from its reliance on high salaries and public education to the “reasonable grounds” standard the CPIB uses to search or arrest suspects without a warrant—doesn’t. (American cops, for example, can also perform warrantless searches in some cases.) It’s also important to stress that Singapore’s corruption prosecutions have to pass through the country’s well-respected courts, which follow basic British procedure, guarantee the right to counsel, and allow opportunities for appeal. Finally, while some of the CPIB’s powers may look ripe for abuse, experts such as Robert Klitgaard, an American economist and corruption specialist, argue that various safeguards (especially the fact that the bureau is supervised by two oversight boards and by Singapore’s directly elected president) have prevented such misuse. A 2005 survey found that ordinary Singaporeans overwhelmingly agree.
All that helps explain why, over the years, so many other countries—including a long list of democracies—have sent representatives to Singapore to study its success. Since 1992 the island has provided anticorruption training to more than eighty thousand officials from 170 other states. Governments from Argentina to Hong Kong to Thailand have all tried to implement Singapore-style systems, and in just the last few years, high-ranking figures from Brazil, India, and Turkey have traveled to the island to scrutinize its methods.
What these officials have no doubt learned is that most of the means Singapore uses to fight corruption are eminently exportable, and some of Lee’s leadership lessons are even more so. First among them is his demonstration of the fact that lofty rhetoric, good training, smart monitoring, and a whole range of carrots and sticks are important, but they’re only necessary, not sufficient, conditions for achieving truly clean government. The real key is unflinching determination at the top. As K. Shanmugam, the law minister, points out, numerous countries already have anticorruption laws that are, on paper, stronger than Singapore’s—yet their systems don’t work. That’s because, he says, “you can have the best rules, the best anticorruption agency, but if your politicians are corrupt…nothing is going to save the system. It’s as simple as that.” Rotberg argues that “leadership precedes institutional safeguards.” It also creates a culture that can permeate an entire society over time—and must, if that society is to truly conquer such a virulent virus.
Singapore’s history offers another, more fundamental moral as well. Lee’s decision to stake his legacy on fighting corruption during one of the most inauspicious moments in the country’s history underscored a powerful insight that leaders of all stripes would benefit from internalizing: the value of starting with nothing. Beginning at the bottom, as he did, can free a leader to turn absence into opportunity, and liberate him or her to try something radically new. All it takes is courage. Or if that’s too much to hope for, simple fear or desperation will do.