IN a misguided attempt to deflect criticism over the rising death toll in the war on drugs, a Palace spokesman compared President Rodrigo Duterte to Singapore’s founding father, the late prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who oversaw his country’s transition from a Third World economy into a First World powerhouse through his authoritarian leadership.
The comparison is wrong on so many levels.
The most obvious one is that although Lee, too, was criticized in his time for human rights abuses, none of these included the killing of 6,000 drug suspects who were denied the fundamental human rights to life and a fair trial.
In contrast, Lee’s endorsement of corporal punishment—the barbaric practice of caning, specifically—seems almost benign in comparison to Duterte’s tacit approval of summary executions. Lee’s practice of suing his opponents into bankruptcy or oblivion was seen as an abrogation of political rights, but so are Mr. Duterte’s threats to kill or jail his critics and more recently, to declare Martial Law.
Another key difference is that Lee forged a meritocracy of highly effective and incorruptible civil servants, a path far different from that taken by Mr. Duterte, who has made no bones about rewarding people who helped him win election. By this means, we now have a former sex guru appointed to the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board and a comedian named assistant vice president of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.
Finally, Lee backed his anti-corruption rhetoric with legislation and executive action, and in the process created a bureaucracy that is acknowledged to be one of the least corrupt in the world. In contrast, while Mr. Duterte talks a good game, his government has not even initiated any legal action against the most corrupt officials from the previous administration.
Despite these differences, presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella insists that we compare Duterte to Lee.
“Like Lee Kuan Yew, he was also very strict. He is very strict but you can also see the progress of the nation,” he told state radio dzRB. “Our actions should not be entirely ideological, but we need to also understand the needs of our country.”
Also like Lee, he said, Duterte was a “very decisive” leader and a “man of action.”
This last remark seems almost laughable, given Mr. Duterte’s penchant for making grand statements—such as threatening to pull out of the United Nations—only to dismiss them as “jokes” the next day. We see the same indecisiveness in his on-again, off-again statements about his intention to declare Martial Law. But of course, this is no laughing matter.