Every African President has a favourite bedtime story. It is not a fairy tale about lions or hares or tortoises. It is a story about a tiny, swampy island with no natural resources that — surprise, surprise! — became one of the richest places on earth. They love Singapore. Kenya’s President Ruto talks about it all the time. The opposition talks about it. Civil society talks about it. The hustler on the matatu talks about it. Mama Mboga and Mtu wa Boda talk about it. We seem collectively, thoroughly, almost comically obsessed with “Becoming the Singapore of Africa.”
But here is the uncomfortable truth that no Kenyan or African politician wants to say out loud. They want the Singaporean skyline, but they are terrified of the Singaporean system! Because if we actually copied Lee Kuan Yew’s playbook — not just the glossy parts, but the brutal, ruthless, zero-tolerance parts — two-thirds of our political class would be in prison by lunchtime. The other third would be under investigation by teatime.
So let us have an honest conversation about what Singapore actually built, why it works, and why it is not as foreign to us as we think. In fact, much of what Singapore engineered, Africa already knew in her bones. Singapore simply had the political will to build walls around the wisdom.
Before Singapore: The Blueprint We Already Had
Here is the detail that should make every Kenyan stop mid-sentence the next time they reach for the Singapore comparison. In 1965 — the same year Lee Kuan Yew was fighting to keep Singapore alive as a brand new, resource-less, deeply anxious nation — Kenya’s own Tom Mboya authored Sessional Paper No. 10, titled “African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya.”
The document called for political democracy, mutual social responsibility, multiple forms of ownership to prevent dangerous concentrations of economic power, and progressive taxation to ensure equitable distribution of wealth. It envisioned a Kenya where citizens had genuine stakes in the national economy. Where the state served the people rather than consumed them. Where merit, not political patronage, nepotism or tribal allegiance, determined advancement.
Sound familiar? It should. Strip away Singapore’s specific institutional machinery — the CPF, the CPIB, the Presumption of Corruption — and you are reading a description of the philosophical foundations on which Singapore built its miracle. Mboya was thinking along parallel lines to Lee Kuan Yew, from an African context, in the same historical moment.
In 1994, the current Governor of Kisumu County, Professor Anyang’ Nyong’o, met Lee Kuan Yew at a Singapore conference. He asked the elder statesman directly: Why did Singapore surge ahead while Kenya fell behind, given that both nations started from roughly the same place? Lee’s answer was not about economics, not about geography or colonial legacy or culture. He said, as a matter of fact:
“While we in Singapore decided to march forward together as a nation, you in Kenya decided to assassinate Tom Mboya.” — Lee Kuan Yew to Prof. Anyang’ Nyong’o, 1994
That is not a tribute to a policy document. It is an epitaph for a possibility. Lee was not saying Singapore copied Mboya’s paper — that claim, which circulates on social media and which I have personally been a victim of propagating, is not supported by evidence. He was saying something more devastating: that Kenya’s failure was a choice, not fate. That Kenya had the intellectual capital, the vision, and the talent to build what Singapore built, or better. And then, on Government Road on the afternoon of July 5th, 1969, Kenya’s political class chose to bury that possibility with three bullets.
It did not end there. Three years later, a year before I was born, in 1972, the Ndegwa Commission Report administered the institutional coup de grâce. It recommended that civil servants be permitted to engage in private business — essentially legalising and institutionalising the conflict of interest that today we know is the mother of all corruption in Kenya. Singapore was building the CPIB and the Presumption of Corruption. Kenya was institutionalising the loophole. That divergence from that moment was not accidental. It was deliberately engineered. It is why Mboya had to pay with his life. What I normally call our “Arrested Development.”
So. When we talk about “Becoming the Singapore of Africa,” we must be honest about what we are actually saying. We are not talking about adopting a foreign model. We are talking about resurrecting a Kenyan one.
The vision was ours. The political will to protect it — that is what was stolen.
The Architecture of Integrity
Singapore’s reputation for being squeaky clean is not an accident. It is not a gift from God, good colonial inheritance, or a uniquely Confucian cultural trait. It is a meticulously engineered system built on a brutally honest acknowledgement of human nature: people respond to incentives. Make honesty profitable and corruption suicidal, and most rational people will choose honesty.
And here is what makes that engineering genuinely remarkable. Lee Kuan Yew was not building on a blank cultural slate. Singapore’s population is roughly 75% ethnic Chinese; many descended from Fujian and Guangdong communities where guanxi — the ancient web of reciprocal relationships — had governed public and private life for three thousand years. Guanxi is not corruption in its own cultural framing. It is relationship maintenance. You bring a gift for the official who processes your permit. You give the contract to your cousin’s firm because loyalty is a virtue. You accept the dinner invitation from the businessman because refusing would be rude. These are not moral failures in the Confucian social order — they are the social order. Lee, himself of Hakka Chinese heritage, understood this operating system from the inside. He knew you cannot simply outlaw a culture with statutes. He had to make the old mathematics — scratch my back, I scratch yours — financially catastrophic enough that even the most guanxi-loyal civil servant would conclude that no relationship, however ancient or warm, was worth the ruin. That is the context in which the Carrot and the Stick were built. Not against a corrupt fringe. Against a three-thousand-year-old way of being.
The Iswaran case, which we will examine in Part Two, becomes even more instructive through this lens. Billionaire Ong Beng Seng was not, in his own cultural mind, “bribing” a minister. He was maintaining guanxi with an important man. Perfectly natural. Deeply normal. Singapore’s response was to say: we see exactly what this is, we understand precisely why it feels courteous, and we are making it a criminal offence precisely because we understand it so well. That is the sophistication Lee brought that most African governments, drowning in their own versions of guanxi — we call it mtu wetu, chai, kurudisha mkono, ethnic solidarity, or simply “our time to eat” — have never summoned the will to match.
Lee Kuan Yew distilled his entire governance philosophy into what is now called the Carrot and Stick approach. The Carrot makes integrity financially attractive. The Stick makes corruption financially catastrophic. Together, they create a simple arithmetic: the expected value of taking a bribe is negative. When the math works against corruption, the culture of corruption gradually starves to death.
“The best way to fight corruption is to ensure that people are paid what they are worth, and that the punishment for taking a bribe is so severe it is simply not worth the gamble.” — Lee Kuan Yew
This is not idealism but rational engineering. And it begins with understanding that corruption is rarely a moral failure alone — it is often a rational response to an extractive colonial system that underpays and under-enforces. Singapore fixed both ends of that equation simultaneously. In Part Two, we examine exactly how — and what the numbers look like in Kenyan shillings.
NEXT — Part Two: The Carrot and the Stick How Singapore made honesty the most rational financial decision a civil servant could make — and built the most feared anti-corruption agency in the world. The numbers, in Kenyan shillings, will shock you.
All Singapore case details, legislation, and salary benchmarks are drawn from publicly available official sources.
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