Natetea nini? Mimi sikariri mambo kama Kasuku tu.
Singapore haijwahi kuwa na upinzani wa maana kutiliwa maanani dhidi ya chama cha PAP, hauna mfano hata mmoja wa kiongozi maarufu au mwenye ushawashi alieywahi kutokea Singapore dhidi ya Lee, hauna mfano wa lini raia wa Singapore walitaka kuandamana kwa sababu ya ubovu wa serikali ya Singapore wakazuiliwa. Mfano mwingine wa mwingine wa demokrasia ya chama kimoja kwa muda mrefu ni Botswana chini ya BDP, uchaguzi unafanyika wa huru na haki, kila kura inayopigwa na inahesabiwa kwa haki na washindi wanatangazwa kwa haki. Sasa wewe utasemaje hiyo sio demokrasia??
Umechagua kusimamia ujinga unaoamini kuhusu Singapore hata kupingana na ukweli naokuambia.
Ukitaka nikutajie wapinzani nikakutajia ila ukashupaza shingo kwa maneno yako ya ajabu kuwa nakariri sasa ni nani anaye kariri mambo kati yangu ama wewe unaye maneno matupu blah blah.
Je, kugandamiza wapinzani wako ni demokrasia ?
Na unapima vipi ukubwa na udogo wa wapinzani kwa serikali ?
Kukamatwa kwa watu zaidi miaka Mia moja kwa sababu za kisiasa kwako wewe ni kukariri mambo ?
Political opponents
On JB Jeyaretnam, a lawyer and opposition lawmaker who called for greater freedoms but was bankrupted by Mr Lee via the courts, in Lee Kuan Yew, The Man And His Ideas, 1997
"If you are a troublemaker… it's our job to politically destroy you. Put it this way. As long as JB Jeyaretnam stands for what he stands for - a thoroughly destructive force - we will knock him. Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac."
The Cambridge-educated scholar wasn’t interested in heady concepts of liberty. As a lawyer he knew them well, but as a British subject, and later during the Japanese occupation, he had learnt an invaluable lesson – you can’t fill stomachs with liberty, but you can chew up those who use it to oppose you. “I learned how to govern, how you dominate the people, as the British did, and how the Japanese used their power,” he said.
And so he arbitrarily detained hundreds of alleged communists, chauvinists and extremists over the years using the Internal Security Act, a holdover from Singapore’s colonial past. It was detention without trial so concrete evidence wasn’t necessary. All you needed was a firm conviction that the country was under siege and the strategic brilliance to outmanoeuvre the enemy.
It was no coincidence that many of these alleged communists were Lee’s political opponents. In 1963, more than 100 opposition politicians and union leaders were deemed a threat to national security and arbitrarily detained, crippling the Barisan Sosialis, the biggest political threat to Lee’s People’s Action Party (PAP)
Lim Chin Slong
Sina hakika hata umaarufu wa Chia thye poh waufahamu maana unatetea vitu vya visivyoweza kutetewa
Press freedom
Address to the General Assembly of the International Press Institute at Helsinki on 9 June 1971
"What role would men and governments in new countries like the mass media to play?... The mass media can help to present Singapore's problems simply and clearly and then explain how if they support certain programmes and policies these problems can be solved. More important, we want the mass media to reinforce, not to undermine, the cultural values and social attitudes being inculcated in our schools and universities.
[Several paragraphs later] Freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government."
