Robert Mugabe and Lee Kuan Yew: Two leaders with very different legacies
Sholto Byrnes
Robert Mugabes mixed legacy was reflected in his funeral on Saturday, where the national stadium set aside for the event was near-empty and South Africas president Cyril Ramaphosa was booed as he made his address. The contrast between his death and that of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Singapore, and how their nations mourned them is instructive. Today marks the birth date of Lee, another major figure in the post-colonial developing world. When he died in 2015, he was synonymous with the city-states history and success.
His death was a matter of genuine national mourning in Singapore. As his countrys leader from 1959 to 1990, he was widely credited with steering it From Third World to First, as the title of his second volume of memoirs put it. When he stepped down as prime minister, he remained omnipresent, first as senior minister, then minister mentor, until 2011. Was he steely-minded, even semi-authoritarian? Perhaps. But Singaporeans still recalled with affection his unapologetic insistence that he knew best, epitomised in his oft-quoted remark: Even from my sickbed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up. At Mugabes funeral, conversely, one attendee told the Guardian newspaper: I just came here to make sure the old man was really dead.
Earlier on, decades ago, it might have seemed as though the two had some things in common. Both were highly intelligent and well-educated. Both were anglophiles, although this was accompanied by some justified and bilious resentment on Mugabes part. Both were at least nominally men of the left: as well as being an African nationalist, Mugabe was a Marxist-Leninist while Lees Peoples Action Party was a member of the Socialist International until 1976. But both Lee and initially Mugabe were non-ideological in their approach to government. Singapores finance minister Goh Keng Swee famously instructed his staff to find him a factory to open every day while Mugabe eased the fears of Zimbabwes white minority on taking office, appointing some as ministers and impressing outsiders with his budgetary restraint, at the same time as making big investments in education and healthcare.
Lee Kuan Yew, hoisted by supporters after leading his Peoples Action Party to a landslide victory in the elections in Singapore. AP
If Mugabe had left office in 1987, he would have been remembered very differently: as a liberation hero who had done a good job, mostly despite his governments killing of up to 20,000 dissenters in Matabeleland, which the West by and large overlooked, relieved that nothing worse had happened and to protect against a backlash against white Zimbabweans.
But that was when he took a turn for the worse. He changed the constitution to give himself dictatorial powers, allowed the expropriation of white-owned farms by so-called war veterans and cronies and presided over a disastrous deterioration of the economy, which led to living standards being lower in 2000 than they had been in 1980 and to the countrys parlous state today.
The writer is a commentator and consultant in Kuala Lumpur and a corresponding fellow of the Erasmus Forum
