You know a society is maturing when even schoolchildren are able to differentiate between politics and reality, or more bluntly, “hard truths”.

In a global village, Jamaica’s lack of progress is now apparent even to our youngest citizens.

The Riverton fire may yet turn out to be a seminal moment in the history of Jamaica’s governance, but only if the media, civil society and the ordinary man and woman on the street decide it should be so.

The timing of opposition leader Andrew Holness’s speech, just before the death of Singapore’s former independence leader, provides the backdrop for a useful discussion on the issue of governance.

Lee Kaun Yew’s famous account of his transformation of Singapore, “From Third World to First” is a book that should be read by all political leaders of developing, and even developed countries, because of the huge number of “hard truths” with which it is filled.

In fact, a couple of years ago, Lee Kaun Yew had a number of leading journalists from the leading Singapore paper, the Singapore Straits Times, ask him any question they wanted over a period of many hours, which was turned into a book by the same name.

In his speech on March 19th, entitled “Moving from Poverty to Prosperity”, Opposition leader Andrew Holness described Jamaica’s situation appropriately as “development delayed”. He referred to the often made comparison of Singapore and Jamaica, “a tale of two countries that started at similar levels of development 50 years ago with almost exactly that same per capital GDP in 1962. Unlike Jamaica, however, he noted that Singapore has moved its people from “poverty to prosperity” so that its GDP per capita is more than ten times that of Jamaica, ranking Singapore ninth in the world on the Human Development index (which measures quality of life) verses Jamaica at 96, out of 183 countries.

On Wednesday evening, Bloomberg TV’s peerless Charlie Rose showed excerpts of a number of extremely revealing interviews that he did with Lee Kaun Yew over almost two decades, when he was Prime Minister, senior Minister in the cabinet, and then merely the country’s “elder”, when his son, also Cambridge University educated, happened to be the Prime Minister.

The interview (or more accurately spliced interviews) was full of “hard truths”, giving an extremely clear view of Lee Kaun Yew’s thought process, and thereby implicitly revealing how Lee Kaun Yew ‘s leadership transformed the country.

We will not be able to cover all the points made in this fascinating interview today, but his world view boils down to one of extreme realism and pragmatism, never wavering in facing up to the “hard truths” of his country’s development challenges, whose success, he makes extremely clear, was in no way preordained.

Patois vs English

In his interview, Lee Kaun Yew even mentioned Jamaica, in the context of the issue of “patois”. He noted that at independence in 1965, Singapore’s multiracial society, consisting of Chinese, Malaysians and Indians, all spoke extremely poor English, meaning some form of patois, in addition to the many different languages of the different races.

The predominant English patois was some form of “Singlish”, reflecting the majority Chinese population. Suffice it to say, Mr. Kuan Yew made the unemotional tough decision that everybody should learn and be taught in English, the international language of business, commerce, technology and science.

This was the starting point of a series of tough decisions, all designed to meld a multiracial nation into one people.

He also forced the races to mix, essentially outlawing “ghettoes”, as part of this nation building plan, although admitting in his last interview that this process of country creation was not yet complete.

A key part of Jamaica’s transformation, as Mr. Holness points out in a quite long, but useful, section on education in his budget speech, is to “dream” that, like Singapore, all schools in Jamaica can perform to high standards. For example, in Singapore the teaching of mathematics is one of the highest ranked in the world.

Deng Xiaoping

When asked who he most admired, Lee Kaun Yew unhesitatingly replied Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Interestingly, he gave the background to Deng’s historic visit to Singapore in 1978, after which, on his return to China, Deng created 12 Chinese “special economic zones”.

The reason for his admiration was that Deng, despite being a veteran of Chairman Mao’s Long March, had the courage to change the Chinese communist system from within, even against severe internal opposition from the Chinese Communist party. He noted that Deng sent 30,000 to 40,000 Chinese technocrats to Singapore to study, deciding, like Singapore, that gaining access to western trade, capital and technology was the way to catch up with the West.

The rest is history.

In her budget speech, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller made a number of important points that were not sufficiently emphasised by our media, reflecting the fact that there is an emerging shift towards completely discounting words, as opposed to deeds, in Jamaica.

Indeed, politicians generally should note that the people are now becoming impatient of platitudes of any sort, and, hopefully, these may even start to become counter productive, as the society accepts the hard truths inherent in areas such as the fiscal discipline required by the IMF’s bitter medicine.

Even more importantly, it now seems to be becoming intolerant of governance failures such as the Riverton dump, almost in the same way as occurred with the extradition issue five years before it.

With respect to the Prime Minister’s speech, amongst the positive messages that were not given sufficient prominence by our local media was her “bigging up” of the local private sector (likely to improve investor confidence), and in particular her mention of Pan Jam and the late, great Maurice Facey.

The potential implications of the arrival of President Obama for US investment in Jamaica needs more media attention (see my Wednesday article “Will President Obama SOCA, reggae or salsa in Kingston town”), and most concretely, her listing of the investments in downtown Kingston signals that the long-awaited redevelopment of downtown Kingston has finally restarted with focussed attention from the Urban Development Corporation, about which we will say more at another time.

Help on this issue of downtown redevelopment should also be part of the wish list for President Obama.

Most importantly, she announced the port concession deal. Not unexpectedly, the key strategic investor appears to be French shipping line CGM.

With regard to the latter decision, many had hoped that it would the leading logistic centres of Singapore and even Dubai who would be the winners, based on their high levels of transparency, high technology and productivity, with Singapore in particular having created what was effectively a “first world oasis”, being possibly the world’s leading logistics hub.

Indeed, Lee Kaun Yew said that his “gateway” trading hub strategy — which more than fifty years after independence we finally seem to have also realised was the correct strategy for the country with the world’s seventh largest natural harbour — was itself inspired by the success of Hong Kong.

In another hard truth, he noted that at independence Singapore neither had the defence provided by the British army, the stability of Hong Kong’s colonial administration, nor British capital, and therefore had to “go it alone”, finding their own path by a process of experimentation and cutting “losers” early.

We will have more to say about the lessons of Singapore, particularly in the areas of corruption, conflicts of interest and what a “team approach” should really mean shortly.

Suffice it to say today, that whilst welcoming Chinese investment, the Government of Jamaica must demand transparency and not opacity if we are to turn this opportunity to our full advantage. Our citizens must demand no less.