Leadership transition: ‘This is an important and real challenge, not to be taken lightly or ignored.

It is one that Singapore wrestles with openly and honestly’

Interview: Ong Boon Hwee, former MD, Temasek Holdings, Singapore

* ‘Singapore has never been constrained by ideological labels, or doctrinal economic models.
It is concerned with what works, and what works depends on sound policies, strong principles and values’

 * ‘Singapore’s political leadership has consistently resisted using the bureaucracy for partisan ends’

In the lexicon of global development, Singapore is frequently cited as the gold standard of rapid, systemic transformation. Yet, as the nation crosses six decades of independence, its trajectory is increasingly viewed not merely as an economic miracle, but as a masterclass in institutional discipline, pragmatic governance, and deliberate social engineering.

To understand the mechanics behind this trajectory, the Mauritius Times sat down with Mr Ong Boon Hwee, former Managing Director of Temasek Holdings and former CEO of the Stewardship Asia Centre. Speaking recently at Telecom Tower at the invitation of Mauritius Telecom, Mr Ong led a deeply reflective conversation titled “Singapore: An Unnatural Success.”
Far from offering standard bureaucratic platitudes, he dissects how a vulnerable, resource-scarce port city systematically turned existential precarity into global strength. He also addresses the paradox of state-guided capitalism — explaining how entities like Temasek ensure public enterprises operate with the commercial rigor of private multinationals — and confronts the ultimate existential question facing any mature democracy: how to successfully transition leadership and pass the torch of national ambition to a generation that inherited prosperity rather than the struggle that built it.

Mauritius Times: We often hear that Singapore’s success was built on long-term vision, discipline, and meritocracy. Yet one factor receives less attention: ambition. How important was this ambition — among both the leadership and the people — to Singapore’s success, and how was it maintained over time without giving way to complacency?

Ong Boog Hwee: “Ambition” is, as defined in the dictionary, a strong desire and determination to achieve a specific goal, a driving force that motivates individuals to put in the time, energy, and effort required to turn their aspirations into reality. In that framing, your use of the word may be apt.

Ambition suggests something more passionate and more charged: it is the refusal to accept that things must be as they are, and the determination to make them otherwise. Singapore’s founding generation possessed that quality in abundance. Consider the following example:

In September 1965, just weeks after an unexpected declaration of independence, Lee Kuan Yew stood before a crowd and declared: “Over 100 years ago, this was a mud-flat, a swamp. Today, this is a modern city. Ten years from now, this will be a metropolis. Never fear.”

To a rational observer, that could have sounded like delusion. There were no resources, no hinterland, hostile neighbours, 10% unemployment, and a population that had never chosen to be a nation. And yet here was the Prime Minister declaring a future that bore almost no relationship to the present.

That declaration was not a forecast. It was an act of leadership. To say “this will be a metropolis” was to begin making it one. Most leaders manage expectations. They hedge. They qualify. They say, “we will try” and “we hope to” and “conditions permitting.” Hedged language produces hedged effort. Qualified ambition produces qualified results.

The ambition was not limited to the leadership. It took root in the people — partly because the leadership made the stakes viscerally clear. Vulnerability was not obscured; it was communicated plainly. The message was: we have almost nothing, we are surrounded by uncertainty, and our survival is genuinely at risk. That clarity of existential threat is, paradoxically, a powerful fuel for ambition. People who understand that they must build or perish tend to build with more purpose than those who are comfortable.

What followed in those early years was governance that defies easy ideological categorisation. It was neither free-market libertarianism nor centrally planned socialism. It pursued outcomes, asking relentlessly: what works? And the ambition that animated it was not the ambition of vanity or prestige, but what I would call earned optimism — the result of having attempted difficult things before, of having developed the judgement to distinguish between risks worth taking and mere recklessness.

Maintaining ambition without giving way to complacency is an equally formidable challenge. Success may at times be a natural enemy of ambition. When you have achieved much, the temptation is to protect what you have rather than to innovate and press forward. The risk of complacency is real. Singapore has tried to guard against this not through pessimism, but through honest self- examination: looking clearly at potential risks and pitfalls, asking uncomfortable questions, and refusing the comfort of assuming that what worked before will work again.

Whether each successive generation can sustain that quality of ambition, without the founding urgency to drive it, remains an open question.

* Beyond raw ambition, the historical context was equally challenging. In the early days of nation-building, ethnic and cultural diversity could easily have triggered political friction or communalism. How did Singapore manage to unite such a diverse population behind a single, focused economic vision, ensuring that communal interests never compromised national development?

This is one of the questions that Singapore’s founding leadership took seriously — and with reason.

The country they inherited was not a nation in any meaningful sense. It was a colonial port city populated by people from many corners of Asia who had arrived in pursuit of economic opportunity, not nationhood. Chinese, Malay, Indian and other communities lived in enclaves, with separate languages, customs, schools and loyalties.

Singapore’s response was to make racial harmony an explicit and active focus. This was not merely the passive tolerance of difference. It was a deliberate encouragement of shared spaces, shared experiences and shared stakes in the country’s journey.

Several mechanisms proved instrumental. The Housing and Development Board’s ethnic integration policy mandated that every public housing block — where over 80% of Singapore’s population lives — maintain a deliberate mix of ethnic communities. This is designed to create shared neighbourhoods and shared experiences of daily life across communal lines. National Service brought young men from every community through a shared formative experience.

The group representation constituency system ensured minority representation in parliament. Cultural and religious celebrations — Chinese New Year, Hari Raya Puasa, Deepavali, Christmas — were designated national holidays, with cross-communal participation encouraged.

Singapore believes that diversity can be actively managed into a national asset. The dividend is found in the stability maintained — in a multi-racial society that functions with a degree of civility and genuine cross-cultural engagement.

The economic dimension was equally important. By creating conditions for rising living standards that cut across all communities — shared housing programmes, universal education, broad-based employment — Singapore gave every community a tangible stake in national development. When people of every background could see their material lives improving in parallel, the appeal of communal politics diminished. The Singapore Pledge — “regardless of race, language or religion” — was not mere rhetoric. It was the stated terms of a social contract that the country committed itself to maintaining, with real effort.

* National transformation requires immense discipline — which can often strain the relationship between the state and its citizens. How did Singapore’s leaders maintain deep public trust and convince the population to accept tough, short- term sacrifices for a prosperity that would only be fully realized by the next generation?

The policies that Singapore pursued in its early decades of independence were demanding. Housing resettlement uprooted communities. Industrial restructuring threatened existing livelihoods. National Service took two years from every young man. The tripartite labour framework constrained union autonomy. None of this was easy, and none of it would have been accepted by a population that did not trust the government asking it.

That trust was built over time on several foundations. The first was ethical leadership. When leaders are honest, the message cascades through every layer of the institution. A second foundation was honest communication about trade-offs. Singapore’s leaders did not pretend that their policies were costless. They explained, in plain terms, what the stakes were and why certain sacrifices were necessary. They made the connection between present difficulty and future prosperity credible. People can accept hardship when they understand its purpose.
Third, the government delivered. The early housing programme moved people from squatter conditions into modern public housing at a scale and speed that would have seemed impossible. Infrastructure improved visibly. Employment grew. The promise of a better life was not left as abstraction; it began to materialise within years of independence.

Each delivery reinforced trust in the next promise, creating a cumulative compact between state and citizen.

The compact of mutual trust — harder to build than any infrastructure, impossible to decree from above — was arguably the most important achievement of Singapore’s founding years.

* Singapore is well known for building an elite, highly compensated, and independent civil service that drove its national success. How does the country protect its public institutions from political interference, ensuring that its bureaucracy remains strictly meritocratic and focused on long-term goals rather than short-term political gains?

The civil service is, in many ways, a linchpin of Singapore’s governance experience. Policies can be rendered ineffective by poor implementation. Singapore’s founding leadership understood this and invested accordingly. One foundation is meritocracy, rigorously maintained. Positions in the civil service are based on capability and performance.

Singapore made a decision to have capable people into the public service, and it offered market-level compensation. The argument here is not that money is the sole motivator — for many public servants, it clearly is not. It is that inadequate compensation creates conditions in which talented people may steadily exit. The investment in human capital runs deeper than compensation.

By investing deeply in professional development, the civil service treated its public servants as assets rather than costs. As a result, when citizens interact with their government — whether for permits, housing, healthcare, or business registration — they encounter institutions that function, processes that work, and timelines that are reliably met. This efficiency cannot be taken for granted; it is foundational both to business confidence and to the deeper trust between state and citizen that underpins everything else.

To protect the civil service from short-term political pressure, Singapore deployed several reinforcing mechanisms. These included a political leadership that has consistently resisted using the bureaucracy for partisan ends, an institutional culture that championed long-term thinking as a professional virtue, and a degree of political continuity that allowed long-horizon planning to truly take root.

As former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong once described it: “Ours is a government which is proactive, looks ahead over the horizon.” That is a forward-looking restlessness that asks what challenges are coming before they arrive.

The ability to develop policies with decade-long implementation horizons — in land use, water security, economic restructuring, port capacity — requires that the institutions executing those policies are not subject to reversal with every electoral cycle. The long-term plans Singapore has pursued all reflect a willingness to make investments whose full returns may not materialise for decades.

* On the other hand, Singapore mastered a unique paradox: state-guided capitalism. Through institutions like the Economic Development Board and Temasek Holdings, the state itself acted as an entrepreneur. In many developing nations, state-owned enterprises become inefficient or prone to political patronage. How did Singapore ensure that its state enterprises operated with the discipline and commercial rigour of private multinational corporations?

Singapore has never been constrained by rigid terminology, ideological labels, or doctrinal economic models. It is concerned with what works, and what works depends on sound policies, strong principles and values.

Looking closely at Singapore’s trajectory, several broad principles emerge that explain how the city-state successfully ensured its state enterprises operated with the discipline, efficiency, and commercial rigour of private multinational corporations.

Separating Ownership from Management. The foundational principle behind Singapore’s approach is the strict separation of ownership from management. Temasek Holdings embodies this principle — it holds and manages investments, and it functions as a commercial holding company rather than a government ministry.

Temasek itself is government-owned but not government-managed. The government’s role is as shareholder — providing capital, setting board appointments, and holding the entity accountable for returns — but not as business manager.

As Singapore’s Ministry of Finance has articulated: “Our philosophy is to have the Government-Linked Company (GLC) operate as commercial entities. The Government does not interfere with the operations of the GLCs… The GLCs are expected to compete on a level playing field, and frequently in a global environment.”

This is not merely a structural arrangement. It is a discipline, actively maintained. As then Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam has described it: the government ensures that people of sound character and judgment are appointed to the board, then steps back.

“We are careful not to have any role or influence in Temasek’s investment decisions. That has been the right approach for Temasek, which makes commercial assessments without having to second-guess whether the Government would agree to its decisions.”

This arm’s length philosophy is explicitly designed to avoid the pitfalls of political interference.

The state as steward. What matters is not so much the structure of ownership as the quality and character of the owner: are they stewards? The key lies in the state behaving as a responsible, engaged, long-term shareholder — not as government ministries that intervene in business operations or micro-manage portfolio companies.

Stewardship as state asset owner requires a consistent focus on long-term value creation; the discipline to resist short-term political interventions; and the transparency that allows accountability to function. The state as steward asks not only “what are we creating today?” but “what are we passing on to those who come after?”

Commercial Objectives. Singapore’s state enterprises compete on a level playing field. They receive no special privileges, no hidden subsidies, and are given no protection from market discipline. This has a crucial implication: underperformance cannot be masked by state support. Businesses that cannot sustain themselves commercially must restructure or exit, not continue indefinitely on life support.

Singapore has also taken care to distinguish between commercial enterprises and public utilities or social services. Those entities that exist to deliver public goods are treated as government agencies, not as businesses. The commercial entities are commercial — and that means: competition, accountability for returns, and the possibility of restructuring or divestiture when warranted.

To make this entrepreneurial role effective, the state creates the ideal conditions and invites private enterprise to operate within them, rather than attempting to substitute for the market. The role is catalytic and structural, not operational. This distinction — between creating the soil in which businesses can grow and trying to run the businesses oneself — is an important insight in Singapore’s governance experience.

The state may intervene where market failure or strategic necessity requires it, and it withdraws where market competition can do the job better. The question being asked is “what actually works?” — and that pragmatism has served Singapore well across six decades of development.

* Finally, one important question about leadership transition: how does Singapore successfully pass on the values, ambition and dedication to national interest that defined the founding fathers to younger generations?

This is an important and real challenge, not to be taken lightly or ignored. It is one that Singapore wrestles with openly and honestly.

The founding generation was animated by an existential urgency. They had lived the early experience of Singapore’s struggle to survive and to succeed. They knew, viscerally, that nothing was guaranteed. That knowledge produced a quality of motivation and dedication that prosperity and stability, paradoxically, make harder to sustain.

Singapore’s response has been to work on several levels simultaneously. At the level of education, Singapore’s school curriculum includes explicit attention to the nation’s history — not a sanitised version of a comfortable past, but the honest account of vulnerability, survival, and the choices that made development possible. The aim is to ensure that young Singaporeans understand not just what was built, but why, and at what cost.

National Service serves a transmission function that goes beyond security. Every generation of young men is brought through a shared experience of national commitment — learning to live and work alongside people from every community and background, under challenging conditions.
The experience instils the understanding, which no classroom can fully convey, that belonging to a nation is not passive — it comes with responsibilities that must be actively discharged.

Over the decades, National Service has become a national institution — one that reinforces in a very tangible way the belief that we are responsible for our own destiny, and that everyone has a part to play in nationhood.

The transition from the urgency of the founding generation to what the current Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has called ‘quiet confidence’ is a profound generational shift. Quiet confidence is what you earn — through sixty years of doing what you said you would do. But it is also a different kind of challenge: it requires a generation that was not there at the beginning to feel the weight of what was built.

The challenge is that each generation must be made to feel that the Singapore story is their story, not a heritage to be passively received and maintained.

Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s call for each Singaporean to become an “author of the next chapter” is precisely this: an explicit invitation to younger generations not to inherit Singapore’s success as a given, but to engage with it as a continuing opportunity and commitment.

What gives cautious ground for confidence is that Singapore does not rely on any single mechanism of transmission. It is a whole-of- society effort: the education system, National Service, the housing policies, the national celebrations that draw all communities together, the ongoing public conversation about Singapore’s vulnerabilities and future directions. No single mechanism is sufficient. Together, they create a web of connection to the national story.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 5 June 2026