1918 - 2010 Goh Keng Swee - People's Action Party - PAP
1918 - 2010 Goh Keng Swee - People's Action Party - PAP
1918 - 2010 Goh Keng Swee - People's Action Party - PAP
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<strong>Goh</strong> speaking to reporters in December 1984, the month he retired from politics. That year marked a changing of the guard in the <strong>PAP</strong>.<br />
pore on the route to industrialisation<br />
and determined the economy should<br />
be exportdriven.<br />
He was also Singapore’s first Minister<br />
for Defence, from 1965 to 1967,<br />
and 1970 to 1979. He set up the armed<br />
forces and started National Service.<br />
which is what he did seven years after<br />
he introduced religious education as a<br />
subject in schools.<br />
As he pointed out to his elder grandchild<br />
years later: “You must always be<br />
a person others can count on to do a<br />
good job, whether the end result is successful<br />
or not.”<br />
Despite his years studying theories,<br />
<strong>Goh</strong> did not go by the book, pronouncing:<br />
“Governments are seldom moved<br />
by doctrines, principles, theoretical arguments<br />
and analyses which academ<br />
Basically, the man who was “always<br />
thinking, thinking, thinking” was the<br />
government’s Mr FixIt, which is why<br />
he became Minister for Education,<br />
a posting he described as the “most<br />
frustrating period” of his life. During<br />
his time, 1979 to 1984, he launched his<br />
ics consider important.”<br />
Instead, he got down and dirty, for<br />
a better picture of whatever he was involved<br />
in. Only then, he believed, one<br />
could come up with good solutions. It<br />
involved reading a lot of reports and<br />
books.<br />
He expected his people to be accountable.<br />
Recalled one MAS officer<br />
who attended weekly sessions with<br />
him in the 1980s: “We were challenged,<br />
we were under pressure to ensure that<br />
our decisions were not only theoreti<br />
most controversial policy streaming<br />
at Primary 3, and sought to raise the<br />
quality of teachers.<br />
What few knew before Minister<br />
Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s eulogy at his<br />
state funeral is <strong>Goh</strong>’s major role in Singapore<br />
leaving Malaysia. The relation<br />
cally sound, but these actions were<br />
also rooted in good market judgment.”<br />
<strong>Goh</strong>’s guardianship of the public<br />
purse was fierce. He routinely turned<br />
down projects which cost more than<br />
$1 million, a huge sum of money in the<br />
1960s, until it was vital the funds were<br />
truly needed, like the $260 million in<br />
the 1970s for the upgrading of Singapore<br />
General Hospital.<br />
And when he was offered the same<br />
pay he had as minister to be deputy<br />
chairman of the MAS and GIC after his<br />
PETIR MAY / JUNE 10<br />
15