₦airaland Forum

BreconHills:
If you had actually read the book you would have seen his comments on Nigeria in the 60's and particularly his references to two specific Nigerian ministers. You would also see that based on his experience with these ministers he did not hold out much hope for Nigeria.

So

Nigerias problems are deep seated and rooted and they require strength of character willing to ignore short term discomfort and complaints by citizens. This was a key part of Singapores development.

You will then not fall into the easy argument of seeing Nigerias problems through the lense of your life time or experiences.

Racoon:
The is a man the famed builder of Lagos is being compared to? For goodness sake, they are miles apart.God help Africa with it useless autocratic and tyrannical despots foisting themselves on a failed continent.

The world have long left us behind as if the colonial masters or imperialists should have continued the conquest or slavery. Most African nation never deserved independence

Guestmale:
Has members of national assembly from eastern part of the country come together as one to raise any bill for actualization of Biafra?

Racoon:
What an emotionally touching story of incredible transformation. This is the power of capable, accountable responsible, and visionary leadership.

And not a leadership driven by greed, bigotry, agberoism emilokanism, certificate forgery, ethno-religio-regional sentiments

Brendaniel:
And Tinubu has not sacrificed half of the measures he is telling his citizens to sacrifice as the president of Nigeria, see the hypocrisy now, what is he a leader for?

Racoon:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1YmPZRw1G3/ nlfp.mod

franchasng:
It wont be easy for them cos they are outnumbered. One Senator Chinda from Rivers state raised the motion in 2022 and he was completely shut down by North and Southwest Senators.


So the best is for North and Southwest Senators to help us Southeasterners by expelling Southeast from Nigeria like Malaysia did to Singaporeans, na beg we de beg una biko, ejoor, it's for our collective good and progress

Racoon:
What an emotionally touching story of incredible transformation. This is the power of capable, accountable responsible, and visionary leadership.

And not a leadership driven by greed, bigotry, agberoism emilokanism, certificate forgery, ethno-religio-regional sentiments

Same happened in south Korea...

Obj would have done ours...but democracy didn't allow him

Racoon:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1YmPZRw1G3/ nlfp.mod

Guestmale:
Hypocrisy of the highest order. Tinubu has not introduced half of strict and tough measures the prime minister introduced to rebuilt his nation, but you people are already crying and calling him names because it isn't your preferred candidate.

Guestmale:
What are the things has Tinubu has asked Nigerians to sacrifice.Has he asked you not to seek medical attention where you can get it even outside the country.Has he tell you not to travelled to anywhere you desire to travel,has he asked you not to import whatever you wish to import except illegal things. Has he banned freedom of speech.Is there no freedom of association. The money he got from fuel subsidy removal has he not distributed it to your state governors inform of increase monthly allocations.

Brendaniel:
But it wasn't Singapore that expelled themselves, it is logical if you don't like someone you send the person away, you think Malaysia at the time had any secession clause? they had to pass it in the parliament.

Why didn't Nigeria go with the path of Malaysia by expelling a people they did not like ?

Racoon:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1YmPZRw1G3/ nlfp.mod

budaatum:
Sorry, but I like my neighbours, and do not want you to abandon me. I opposed the expulsion of Ghanaians, and wouldn't want to expel my Igbo neighbours, because I need you to help curb the Yorubas who would end up leading me, and I want us to join together to go free the Hausas from the colonising Fulanis.

Strength in togetherness, is my motto.

post=136706757:
It is true that Lee Kuan Yew did some of these things. For example, he built a world-class educational system, and he underwent an urban renewal that revamped slums. He paid ministers really high wages because of the expertise required and fought a great war against corruption. But that isn’t all he did—or thought.

You see, LKY believed a few foundational things that drove his actions. In a 1983 rally, he said this to his party members:

“If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards. Standards of competence will decline. For how can we avoid lowering performance when, for every two graduates… in 25 years’ time, there will be one graduate, and for every two uneducated workers, there will be three?”

The implication was obvious. He believed competence and intelligence were somehow linked to genetics. In case people misquoted him or believed he didn’t mean it, he made the same remark in Hard Truths:

“When the graduate man does not want to marry a graduate woman, I tell him he’s a fool, stupid. You marry a non-graduate, you’re going to have problems—some children bright, some not bright. You’ll be tearing your hair out.”

He believed that stupid people gave birth to stupid children. And he didn’t just keep this thought to himself—he acted on it. In the 1960s, Singapore was experiencing crazy population growth. LKY thought this would affect the small island nation in the future, so he did the sane and normal thing that any of us would have done: He instituted a national voluntary sterilization program for women.

This program, true to form, didn’t target rich or educated women. It targeted the poorest women, with the government paying up to 10,000 Singaporean dollars to women who chose to sterilize themselves after their first or second kid. He also targeted the richest and most educated women with the Graduate Mothers Scheme, which gave them perks for having kids. So he made sure the poor and uneducated gave birth to fewer kids, and the rich and educated gave birth to more kids.

The impact of this program was quickly visible, as Singapore’s Total Fertility Rate dropped from over 3.0 in 1970 to below 2.0 by the late 1970s. To put that more clearly, around a third of the future generation was wiped out. Singapore’s population has never recovered and now stands at lower than 1.

LKY’s eugenic instincts didn’t stop there. In the above screenshot, our poster tells us how LKY banned tribal politics. However, he banned it in the sense that he made sure it would never be possible again. He made sure that Chinese people made up 75% of the nation by encouraging immigration from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. He also granted thousands of Chinese immigrants permanent leave to stay while using metrics like education, language, and economic contribution—all factors that guaranteed a Chinese majority.

Remember that we already know that LKY believed in genetic intelligence. Therefore, he only did this because he believed that Han Chinese were just smarter than the Malays and Indians who made up a significant chunk of the Singapore population. So his policies were geared toward maximizing the percentage of Chinese because he believed they were simply superior people.

Here is how this position was put in the book Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas:

“There are deep and abiding differences between groups. And whatever we do, we must remember that in Singapore, the Malays feel they are being asked to compete unfairly, that they are not ready for the competition against the Chinese and the Indians and the Eurasians. They will not admit or they cannot admit to themselves that, in fact, as a result of history, they are a different gene pool and they do not have these qualities that can enable them to enter the same race.”

Elsewhere, he says this:

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I've come to.”

These quotes make Lee Kuan Yew as straightforward a racist as you are ever likely to meet. And he wasn’t a racist in the sense that it didn’t affect his work. He was a racist in the sense that it was what most of his work was about. By the end of his life, he was certain that the most important reason Singapore was successful was because it was majority Chinese.

This is crucial: His position wasn’t that cultural hegemony was good—but that cultural hegemony of the right race was good. That is why he said he would never have been successful if Singapore had been majority Indian or Malay. Let’s hear from the man himself:

“I have said this on many a previous occasion: that had the mix in Singapore been different, had it been 75% Indians, 15% Malays and the rest Chinese, it would not have worked. Because they believe in the politics of contention, of opposition. But because the culture was such that the populace sought a practical way out of their difficulties, therefore it has worked…. I have said openly that if we were 100 per cent Chinese, we would do better. But we are not and never will be, so we live with what we have.”

Lee Kuan Yew didn’t only have a low opinion of Malays and Indians—he had an even lower opinion of Blacks. After reading The Bell Curve by Charles Murray, a book that posited (tangentially, at least), among other things, that Black backwardness is caused, at least in part, by low genetic intelligence, Lee Kuan Yew had this to say:

“The Bell Curve is a fact of life. The Blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ, and it is accurate—nothing to do with culture. The Whites score on average 100. Asians score more… the Bell Curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow…. Supposing we had hidden the truth and taken the American approach and said, all men are equal. Then they (the less able or well-off) will demand equal results. And when the results are not equal, they will demand more equal treatment.”

It is important to note that these views weren’t an irrelevant part of his person. They drove his politics, and in his view, were the most important reason he was a success. This must be bad news for the Nigerians looking for their next Lee Kuan Yew.

If the man were to be seriously asked for suggestions on how Nigeria could also experience the Singaporean miracle, his answer would likely be that we can’t. Or if he said we could, he would likely suggest immediate eugenic policies that many Very Serious Nigerians will cry about from Lagos to New York.

Are you seriously going to suggest to the Nigerian uneducated, unaccomplished poor that it isn’t in the country’s interest for them to be fruitful and multiply? Are you going to suggest to Nigerian society that bandits and militants should at least be sterilized before they are “rehabilitated”? It is an unworkable situation.

Read the full article here https://elewa.substack.com/p/never-ask-a-nigerian-what-lee-kuan

benardtotti:
He launched sweeping reforms in housing, education, defense, and urban hygiene. The Housing Development Board (HDB) rolled out the world’s most ambitious public housing program. He famously banned chewing gum, not out of pettiness, but as part of a broader campaign for cleanliness and order. Strikes, riots, and public disorder were clamped down on with uncompromising resolve

If BAT does half of this, same OP will be up in arms crying democracy is dead.

This is the honest truth i have observed about Africa and why we are under developed:
African leaders who try to change the status quo especially in a democratic setting end up failing as most Africans are only after what they can eat today and not future plans, any African leader who tries to do hard reforms will get called out so most of them chicken out and just keep pleasing the masses just to stay in power , the few successful African countries are those with either dictators or long term democratic terms, reason I'm an advocate of 5 to 7 year tenure for presidents .

Jerry rawlings ruled Ghana both as military and civilian for over 20 years and set a template for Ghana, Lagos has been the most consistent state in Nigeria for decades cos its a one party state, Rwanda has come up from its genocide past cos the president has been in power since 1996.

For africa to move forward all these 4 year nonsense won't work .

benardtotti:
He launched sweeping reforms in housing, education, defense, and urban hygiene. The Housing Development Board (HDB) rolled out the world’s most ambitious public housing program. He famously banned chewing gum, not out of pettiness, but as part of a broader campaign for cleanliness and order. Strikes, riots, and public disorder were clamped down on with uncompromising resolve

If BAT does half of this, same OP will be up in arms crying democracy is dead.

This is the honest truth i have observed about Africa and why we are under developed:
African leaders who try to change the status quo especially in a democratic setting end up failing as most Africans are only after what they can eat today and not future plans, any African leader who tries to do hard reforms will get called out so most of them chicken out and just keep pleasing the masses just to stay in power , the few successful African countries are those with either dictators or long term democratic terms, reason I'm an advocate of 5 to 7 year tenure for presidents .

Jerry rawlings ruled Ghana both as military and civilian for over 20 years and set a template for Ghana, Lagos has been the most consistent state in Nigeria for decades cos its a one party state, Rwanda has come up from its genocide past cos the president has been in power since 1996.

For africa to move forward all these 4 year nonsense won't work .

Brendaniel:
So are you saying Tinubu only came to stop subsidy that the citizens directly enjoyed to share more money to state governors?

post=136706757:
It is true that Lee Kuan Yew did some of these things. For example, he built a world-class educational system, and he underwent an urban renewal that revamped slums. He paid ministers really high wages because of the expertise required and fought a great war against corruption. But that isn’t all he did—or thought.

You see, LKY believed a few foundational things that drove his actions. In a 1983 rally, he said this to his party members:

“If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards. Standards of competence will decline. For how can we avoid lowering performance when, for every two graduates… in 25 years’ time, there will be one graduate, and for every two uneducated workers, there will be three?”

The implication was obvious. He believed competence and intelligence were somehow linked to genetics. In case people misquoted him or believed he didn’t mean it, he made the same remark in Hard Truths:

“When the graduate man does not want to marry a graduate woman, I tell him he’s a fool, stupid. You marry a non-graduate, you’re going to have problems—some children bright, some not bright. You’ll be tearing your hair out.”

He believed that stupid people gave birth to stupid children. And he didn’t just keep this thought to himself—he acted on it. In the 1960s, Singapore was experiencing crazy population growth. LKY thought this would affect the small island nation in the future, so he did the sane and normal thing that any of us would have done: He instituted a national voluntary sterilization program for women.

This program, true to form, didn’t target rich or educated women. It targeted the poorest women, with the government paying up to 10,000 Singaporean dollars to women who chose to sterilize themselves after their first or second kid. He also targeted the richest and most educated women with the Graduate Mothers Scheme, which gave them perks for having kids. So he made sure the poor and uneducated gave birth to fewer kids, and the rich and educated gave birth to more kids.

The impact of this program was quickly visible, as Singapore’s Total Fertility Rate dropped from over 3.0 in 1970 to below 2.0 by the late 1970s. To put that more clearly, around a third of the future generation was wiped out. Singapore’s population has never recovered and now stands at lower than 1.

LKY’s eugenic instincts didn’t stop there. In the above screenshot, our poster tells us how LKY banned tribal politics. However, he banned it in the sense that he made sure it would never be possible again. He made sure that Chinese people made up 75% of the nation by encouraging immigration from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. He also granted thousands of Chinese immigrants permanent leave to stay while using metrics like education, language, and economic contribution—all factors that guaranteed a Chinese majority.

Remember that we already know that LKY believed in genetic intelligence. Therefore, he only did this because he believed that Han Chinese were just smarter than the Malays and Indians who made up a significant chunk of the Singapore population. So his policies were geared toward maximizing the percentage of Chinese because he believed they were simply superior people.

Here is how this position was put in the book Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas:

“There are deep and abiding differences between groups. And whatever we do, we must remember that in Singapore, the Malays feel they are being asked to compete unfairly, that they are not ready for the competition against the Chinese and the Indians and the Eurasians. They will not admit or they cannot admit to themselves that, in fact, as a result of history, they are a different gene pool and they do not have these qualities that can enable them to enter the same race.”

Elsewhere, he says this:

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I've come to.”

These quotes make Lee Kuan Yew as straightforward a racist as you are ever likely to meet. And he wasn’t a racist in the sense that it didn’t affect his work. He was a racist in the sense that it was what most of his work was about. By the end of his life, he was certain that the most important reason Singapore was successful was because it was majority Chinese.

This is crucial: His position wasn’t that cultural hegemony was good—but that cultural hegemony of the right race was good. That is why he said he would never have been successful if Singapore had been majority Indian or Malay. Let’s hear from the man himself:

“I have said this on many a previous occasion: that had the mix in Singapore been different, had it been 75% Indians, 15% Malays and the rest Chinese, it would not have worked. Because they believe in the politics of contention, of opposition. But because the culture was such that the populace sought a practical way out of their difficulties, therefore it has worked…. I have said openly that if we were 100 per cent Chinese, we would do better. But we are not and never will be, so we live with what we have.”

Lee Kuan Yew didn’t only have a low opinion of Malays and Indians—he had an even lower opinion of Blacks. After reading The Bell Curve by Charles Murray, a book that posited (tangentially, at least), among other things, that Black backwardness is caused, at least in part, by low genetic intelligence, Lee Kuan Yew had this to say:

“The Bell Curve is a fact of life. The Blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ, and it is accurate—nothing to do with culture. The Whites score on average 100. Asians score more… the Bell Curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow…. Supposing we had hidden the truth and taken the American approach and said, all men are equal. Then they (the less able or well-off) will demand equal results. And when the results are not equal, they will demand more equal treatment.”

It is important to note that these views weren’t an irrelevant part of his person. They drove his politics, and in his view, were the most important reason he was a success. This must be bad news for the Nigerians looking for their next Lee Kuan Yew.

If the man were to be seriously asked for suggestions on how Nigeria could also experience the Singaporean miracle, his answer would likely be that we can’t. Or if he said we could, he would likely suggest immediate eugenic policies that many Very Serious Nigerians will cry about from Lagos to New York.

Are you seriously going to suggest to the Nigerian uneducated, unaccomplished poor that it isn’t in the country’s interest for them to be fruitful and multiply? Are you going to suggest to Nigerian society that bandits and militants should at least be sterilized before they are “rehabilitated”? It is an unworkable situation.

Read the full article here https://elewa.substack.com/p/never-ask-a-nigerian-what-lee-kuan

Brendaniel:
But can you say the same of your fellow country people who killed about 3 million Igbos against their wish?

Guestmale:
The top three presidential candidates in the last election all agreed that subsidies must go and promised to remove fuel subsidies if voted for, even most renowned economists also said it must go.The money Tinubu shared to your governor is it for his (governor) private use or to use it for the benefits of the state.

budaatum:
Yes I can. The Igbos rose up and fought a war of secession, and Nigeria fought back to retain its territorial integrity, and people were killed in the process.

If my Yoruba land is stupîd enough to rise up and fight for the Oduduwa Republic some are clamouring for, more than 3 million of us will be killed for our stupidîty by Nigeria.

My hope is someday, we would be intelligent enough to separate peacefully, if we must, though I hope we don't, but that day of intelligence has not arrived yet, and separation now would just create other problems for us.

Brendaniel:
No, Nigeria broke a peaceful agreement with the Igbos(Aburi Accord) and Igbos had to do the same by declaring Biafra, Nigeria then waged war on Biafra, Igbos had to defend themselves, so how is that the fault of the Igbos?

budaatum:
Yes I can. The Igbos rose up and fought a war of secession, and Nigeria fought back to retain its territorial integrity, and people were killed in the process.

If my Yoruba land is stupîd enough to rise up and fight for the Oduduwa Republic some are clamouring for, more than 3 million of us will be killed for our stupidîty by Nigeria.

Who? What determines when that day of intelligence would arrive?

Personally, I do not support the disintegration of Nigeria, but if a class of people insist on being alone, for the sake of humanity and sensible reasoning, you leave them to it. How is territorial integrity more important that the millions of lives wasted in that war, and the millions still being wasted cause we want to maintain “territorial integrity.”

Some northerners want sharia, some easterners, Biafra and some westerners, Oduduwa. Will it be too much to allow a referendum and if a greater number prefer Nigeria, we do Nigeria, if a loosed federation or confederation is contemplated, we go that direction, if not, “to your tent o Israel.”

That act alone will silence to a large extent dissenting voices within the federation, foster patriotism as people are not forced to believe in their country, the believe should be organic, natural.

When and if patriotism is in place, trust me, leadership and followership crisis would have been addressed as these patriotic Nigerians will put in place systems that will work for the Nigeria they love and pledge allegiance.

My hope is someday, we would be intelligent enough to separate peacefully, if we must, though I hope we don't, but that day of intelligence has not arrived yet, and separation now would just create other problems for us.

budaatum:
No right to secession in the Nigerian Constitution
Indivisible sovereign state: Section 2(1) of the 1999 Constitution explicitly declares Nigeria an "indivisible and indissoluble sovereign state," which effectively prohibits secession.

Territorial integrity: The Constitution mandates the armed forces to maintain Nigeria's territorial integrity, making unilateral secession unconstitutional and subject to military intervention.

Onerous amendment process: Any potential legal path to secession would require a constitutional amendment, a difficult process that demands broad support across two-thirds of Nigeria's states.

NewHe:
The truth Nigerians doesn't want to accept. Citizens must make sacrifice for great future!