Never Ask A Nigerian What Lee Kuan Yew Thought of Race Statistics
A lot of Nigerians wouldn't praise LKY if they knew what he believed
In 2015, millennial Nigerians, who were coming of age, told everyone else the truth of the matter: Nigeria needed a disciplinarian and a frugal politician, just like the legendary leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. That politician, they swore, was the almost-octogenarian, serial coupist, and now born-again democrat Muhammadu Buhari.
He was essentially Lee Kuan Yew Part 2. He was a larger-than-life figure who didn’t need to steal and didn’t need money. What would he even use money for? He didn’t womanize, didn’t live lavishly, and could survive on just a twenty-naira sachet of Milo for breakfast. That same Milo was 200 naira when he left office eight years later.
Due to his Lee Kuan Yew-ness, Nigerian “intellectuals” defended his every move. When he removed the chief justice of the Supreme Court, we learned that was exactly what Lee Kuan Yew would have done. When he plunged the country into recession, we learned that corruption was only fighting back, as it did under our dear Lee Kuan Yew. When he jailed political opponents for donkey years, we learned that was the price we paid to get the Black Lee Kuan Yew.
But the truth is pretty stubborn, and by the time he left, everyone (well, almost everyone) realized that Muhammadu Buhari had a name, and it wasn’t Lee Kuan Yew. That was a sad development, but God forbid that development stops our talent search for Lee Kuan Yew. The new darling of the Nigerian intellectual class, Peter Obi, is also now wise to the gimmick and has been reeling off statistics from Singapore’s dramatic transformation under LKY in every third interview. Perhaps he wants to be baptized as the next Black Lee Kuan Yew?
However, the truth is a bit more complex. There are probably ten thousand posts by Very Serious Nigerians about how Lee Kuan Yew transformed Singapore. The most recent example crystallizes something all Very Serious Nigerians think, and it is difficult to find words to describe it.
It is like the foundation of a magical soap opera: In the land of myth and magic, where nothing is caused and everything merely happens, the destiny of a great nation rests on the shoulders of one man—the president.
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.
But since, as LKY believed, Blacks aren’t as smart as the Chinese, he wouldn’t belabor the point whatsoever. He would just shake his head, smile, log on to his racism app, and tweet: Many such cases.
Thankfully, very few Nigerians know this side of their hero. When the 2027 elections roll by, Nigerians will flood the airwaves with tales of “Singapore did it with Lee Kuan Yew, so why can’t we?” conveniently forgetting that their hero believed the answer was simple—because we are not Chinese.
And poor Elewa would tell himself the three cardinal truths he has come to learn in his journey of life: Never ask a man his salary, never ask a woman her age, and never ask a Nigerian what Lee Kuan Yew thought of race statistics.
Reason I have no hope for Nigeria even in the next century because we see the most retarded of us impregnating many women in the streets and giving birth to kids they cannot cater for. The smarter ones have 3 kids or less and leave the country with their smart kids. We are left with a majority low intelligence population that would overshadow the few high intelligence one and sabotage their efforts.
Haha, I love the term 'Very Serious Nigerians'!
We're obsessed with stereotypical 'strong men' leaders, often idolizing the leaders of successful nations while glossing over their problematic views & bloody track records. You'd get this when you look at the way everyone's moving like Traore's PR officer.
If someone tried to replicate LKY's policies here, Nigerians would hit the streets in protest.