Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam
Happy Birthday, JBJ. Your contribution to the People will always be remembered.
Today is JBJ’s birthday. In remembrance of JBJ, what better way than to relive his tenacity. This article is an edited excerpt of JBJ’s parliamentary speech first made in response to the 1985 Presidential Address. There will also be a JBJ memorial held at Speaker’s Corner 7pm this evening.
There is a general air of expectancy. I was asked a number of times before today about this sitting of Parliament and sensed the eager expectation of the people to see what would be the Government’s program and what would be said in Parliament on it. Now, this expectancy arises, I need not remind Members, from the results that came to light on the night of 22nd December 1984 when the last General Elections were hold.
For the first time since 1959 when this Government took office, there was a significant swing away from the Government towards the Opposition parties. People were clearly expressing their discontent, their dissatisfaction, with what had gone on for the last 25 years. And this result evoked comments overseas. They were saying that Singapore had come of age that the Singapore people had matured and were showing that they were politically able to take charge of their country’s affairs.
The Prime Minister was so disturbed by the results at his press conference that a foreigner had to tell him that he should relax and that the end of the world hadn’t come because his Party had lost 12% of the votes. He should know better. He should know that governments come and go but people survive and continue.
Now, what was the signal that the voters were sending to the Government through the ballot box, the most democratic method of selecting government? The signal that the Prime Minister acknowledged was that the voters wanted a less austere and open government.
That was an acknowledgement by the Prime Minister that the voters were saying that a lot of Government activities, Government decisions, had been made in a hole-and-corner fashion that Government decisions had not been explained, had not been justified before the electorate, that they had been left without any consultation before important decisions affecting their livelihood were made by the Government.
The other thing that the Prime Minister acknowledged was that the people were complaining about the Government being too austere. I do not think that the electorate mind any government being austere. What the citizen and the electorate will mind is when he or she feels that his rights or her rights as citizens are being deprived, when they are not given their full rights as citizens of the country.
Nobody is going to complain about austerity if austerity is necessary provided everyone is given his rights or her rights and all are treated equally. So we come back to the question of the rights of our citizens in this country of ours, whether the Government’s actions in the past, for the last 25 years, had been one of a violation of the fundamental rights of the citizens, a neglect, a criminal neglect of their rights as human beings.
The voters were saying much more than what the Prime Minister acknowledged. They were saying that they want their fundamental rights and freedom as human beings in this place, let alone as citizens. I do not propose to detail all the rights of which they have been deprived over the last 25 years. I have in this House over the last three years since I entered it in December 1981 complained again and again about the violation of these rights and I do not propose to go through them again.
I need only say one, and that is even on the question of a personal right as marriage, it would appear that some of our citizens still have to get the permission of the Government before he or she can marry. This is a personal right. So our citizens were saying through the ballot box that it is time that their rights were recognized, their rights as citizens, their rights as human beings, were recognized by this Government.
Only not very long ago, the Opposition Leader of a country not very far from here was also calling after their elections for the restoration of full democratic rights. And he was warning the government in that country that there would be social unrest unless the full democratic rights of the citizens were restored to them.
I am not here to warn the Government of social unrest but I would urge upon the Government to take that seriously. These rights are universal rights, recognized now by all countries all over the world. They have become fundamental and universal for the wellbeing of every human being wherever he or she may be, whether it is Singapore or Timbuktu.
Secondly, the voters were saying that government should be conducted openly, that decisions of the Government are seen by the public to have been made upon due reason, due causes, and Ministers are made to publicly justify their decisions. And they, of course, ask that they should be heard, that there should be adequate consultation with the people before any decisions are made.
After this message, the signal, as the Prime Minister called it, from the voters, we have had a number of statements from the Ministers of the Government trying to pacify our voters and promising them that the Government would take note of their wishes and would implement measures to bring this about. We have had the First Deputy Prime Minister speak at a meeting of community leaders on 8th February and which was reported in the Sunday Times on 10th February. These are his words:
So we have got to try and fire the imagination of Singaporeans so that there is a now creative environment, there is a new vitality to take us through the next 25 years.
And it is about this now creative environment, the creative vibrant society, that the First Deputy Prime Minister says will be the objective of the Government that I propose to examine. How is the Government proposing to bring about a creative, vibrant society which the Government accepts should be the desirable aim of us in Singapore?
Whilst the First Deputy Prime Minister speaks about the creation of a creative, vibrant society, I find somewhat different the Prime Minister’s speech at the Tanjong Pagar Community Centre New Year Get-together which was reported in the papers of the 25th February 1985. To the Prime Minister, it seemed all that mattered was disciplining of the society. Society cannot, as I understood him, progress unless everybody was disciplined and those undisciplined were punished.
And he says, “Well, you know, how hard we can punish.” The Prime Minister was quoted as having said that the problem for younger Singaporeans was how they could be galvanized to go up and stay on top. May I say that that is the wrong diagnosis. It seems to me, in the first place, to be a very materialistic and selfish motive to set before the younger Singaporeans, before the young of our country. And that is partly the cause for our present discontent, the materialistic self-acquiring philosophy that this Government has preached from 1959.
I would commend to the Prime Minister and to the Government that the problem is not trying to persuade Singaporeans to go to the top and stay on top. I do not think that Singaporeans, the young Singaporeans, are all bent on that, as it were, the rule of the jungle. As I see it, the problem that this Government will face over the next five years is how to persuade or convince our young people in our midst that in the Singapore society they can live their lives to the fullest dignity as human beings.
That seems to me to be the problem – to get our young people to take pride in the society that we have built for them and to be ready to contribute in their own way to the building of the society. I have studied the addendum to the first objective outlined in the President’s Speech which talks about the character of the society, and it is on that that I am speaking this morning, and I find neither in the President’s Address nor in the addendum anything at all, nothing about the steps, the measures that this Government has, or plans to take, to achieve this creative vibrant society. In place of that, all we have is a lot & wishy-washy thinking.
In his addendum, the First Deputy Prime Minister says ‘we will have this and we will have that’ and it goes on ad infinitum. The question is whether you are going to involve our people to build a society to their liking, to their satisfaction because that would appear to be the first objective of the Government. A vibrant creative society is one where its members live to the fullest dignity as human beings.
An individual cannot live in the fullest dignity unless he has certain fundamental rights and freedoms which are protected and can be enforced if they are violated. So may I commend to the Government that the first requirement is a restoration or investing our people of their rights as human beings.
The First Deputy Prime Minister in his speech to the community leaders reported on the 10th of February, 1985, speaks about the machinery for consulting the people. I was asked by the press what I thought about this, and my reply was, “let’s not have any more machinery. What is needed is freeing, liberating our people.”
We have inherited from the time that we were under the colonial government a restriction on the freedom of speech. Is it necessary to continue this restriction? We do not need any more feedback machineries. All we need is to allow our citizens to say what they wish to say, of course, within the limits of the law. There is the law of libel, there is the law of sedition.
To criticize the government, to take it to task openly outside. The trouble is that once you set up, as it were, a consultative machinery and you stage forums, you would only hear the things that you want to hear. People must be left to their own to say what they wish to say. The trouble in Singapore is that everything is over-controlled, over-regulated. The Government apparently thinks that our people cannot do anything unless they have a Minister in charge; even to the extent of arranging football league games or matches, they must have a Minister.
Let us not insult our people. They can do it very well on their own. I seem to be spending too much time on this fundamental right. May I, because they are very important, refer you to one paragraph of the Report of the Constitutional Commission in 1966. After we came out of Malaysia in 1965, the Prime Minister was all euphoric about investing our citizens with their rights.
He was going to have a new Constitution, everything was going to be spelt out, there was going to be fundamental rights, Singapore was going to be a model country for the rest of the world to take note, and so he said he was going to appoint a Constitutional Commission which would listen to representations and then come out with a Report and then there would be a new Constitution.
That was 1966 and we are still waiting for a new Constitution based upon these proposals of the Constitutional Commission that was appointed in 1966. May I say that your predecessor in office at that time was the Deputy Chairman of this Constitutional Commission. It was chaired by the Chief Justice. They say this, in paragraph 20 (so it is not me who is saying it; it is the Constitutional Commission):
In this present era a notion is the sum total of all its citizens. In a nation, under a democratic form of government, each and everyone of its citizens is entitled to certain fundamental rights and freedoms, the enjoyment of which is protected by law and the enforcement which can be obtained from the Court whom Judges are independent of the Executive.
They then go on to say:
In return for the protection afforded to him of the enjoyment of these rights and freedoms each citizen owes a corresponding duty not to exercise any of these rights and freedoms if by so doing he unjustifiably prejudices the public interest or the rights and freedoms of other citizens.
It goes without saying that where you confer a right there is a corresponding duty. And I am sure our citizens will not be lacking in recognizing their duties if you confer on them their rights. And it is important that not only that the rights be conferred, but that there be safeguarding of these rights once they have been conferred, and there should be remedies where there has been a violation or a threatened violation of these rights of the people.
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First spoken 24 years ago, NOT 14 years ago.
/// So we have got to try and fire the imagination of Singaporeans so that there is a now creative environment, there is a new vitality to take us through the next 25 years. ///
One more year to go………..
JB was right. That’s our rights and we had never enjoy using. It is in our constitution and i just realised after reading the constitution.
Guys do read up our constitution and think what had went wrong
http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/non_version/cgi-bin/cgi_retrieve.pl?&actno=Reved-CONST&date=latest&method=part
There will be a gathering at Hong Lim park this evening to commemorate JBJ. Hope that more people will attend.
our constitution is a joke in the eyes of leekuanyew
even our pledge is already tabooed by him
my respect to the belated jeyaratnam
for he will be REMEMBERED alway
the solo man who defeated the whole pap government till death do him part…
JBJ in representing ordinary Sporeans took countless insults on their behalf and departed without crawling to or taking favours from the most dominant chimp.
That is dignity at its best.
A man is not measured by his riches or by the power he held but by the tears people shed for him when he dies. I still remember the genuine tears so many shed his JB’s death was announced. Many a old man and women who could hardly speak a word of English knew about the man who fought for them till the end. Some had gone to him for legal help when they felt that they have a been unfairly denied of their rights.
Someone recently asked if a Malay would share his last grain of rice with someone from another race and here was a man who gave up all his material possession , except his dignity and honour, to fight for the people, regardless of race, language or religion.
He meant it when he said “Don’t insult the people” and I have never seen him do it, even to his foes, although he was judged to have defamed many in power. Others have openly insulted him when he was alive and even after his death. He did not have to put a monetary value on his honour and that was the greatness of the manth. To him “Power to the People” was not an aspiration but a universal human right he fought for. He did not get a official grand funeral or hundreds of expansive orbituaries from people who wanted to showcase their grief. Instead he got quiet candle light farewells from people who really appreciated the man for what he had done. When he died no one was glad except a perhaps a few who refused to acknowledge what he really stood for and tried to portray him as a destructive force out to create havoc to their power base. The genuine tear shed itself is an honour that no amount of power or self-proclaimed greatness can buy. Not when the people are waiting anxiously to attend your funeral and place orbituaries and declare “At Last”
Whatever his flaws in procedural matters and shortcoming in political cunning, JBJ was a fine example of an ordinary human being who was not merely driven by “base animal instincts”. He had a fine appreciation of higher ideals, the moral optimism to believe that these ideals could be enjoyed by all, the courage to take on those who wield power greatly in excess of his own, and the tenacity to stick to his guns for his beliefs, till the end.
So much for our great Father-of-the-Nation’s ideologically impoverished impression of the human creature. To my mind, only animals are ruthlessly and pragmatically fixated upon self-interest, without scant regard for the wishes or opinion of fellow creatures.
I read somewhere that when Speaker’s Corner first came to be, JBJ refused to take part. His reason: This is a free country, we should be able to speak freely anywhere.
Good man. Radical thoughts, but definitely not destructive. Politically incorrect, but frank and honest. Emotional, but who can say they have believed as passionately as he did till the last breath? And indeed, many of his thoughts here still hold valid today. A salute to a good man.
I do wish, however, just for the heck of it, TOC will post the LKY response in Parliment to this, if any, possibly to ‘demolish’ such ‘high faulatin ideals’? :)
i think i have spoke out about the importance of the paramount Constitution many times here in TOC lol…..i have warn you all my fellow Singaporeans that the Government is seriously violating the supreme law of the land. Freedom of speech for example.
Our late JBJ is always a true People’s Representative.
All the bad things that happened to him did not deterred him from Voicing up for the people. This is what i call true sacrifice for the people.
“Jeyaretnam’s words remain just as inspirational and relevant today.”
Why am i not surprised?
Thanks for the post!
I admire Mr. Jeyaretnam even more!!
JBJ, I wish you happiness in your New Found World.
I believe your Son has the capability to continue your legacy and even made History.
Singaporeans have woken up and maybe will be a little difficult to obtain majority Win, but I believe that there will be a significant Swing and overall percentages improvement of Opposition voters.
Every increment in % is a step towards change and True Democracy.
Lets make it happen, starting with this coming Election.
Thanks for reproducing this TOC.
What stuck me over and over again is still how relevant most of what JBJ was saying here about freedoms and such in todays Singapore.
RIP JBJ.
The late JBJ, the man and his words – simply ahead of his time.
A visionary wiser than most from the past and even to current generation.
What a way to say it…..24 years ago….
I can clearly see a policy where hardly any consulation was made…FT policy.
Singapore clearly had 2 fathers.
1 Economic and anothe for Human Rights.
May he rest in peace.
Thank You TOC for putting up an intelligent speech so timely required for Singaporeans.
What a way to say it…..24 years ago….
I can clearly see a policy where hardly any consulation was made…FT policy.
Singapore clearly had 2 fathers.
1 Economic and another for Human Rights.
May he rest in peace.
Thank You TOC for putting up an intelligent speech so timely required for Singaporeans.
19) prettyplace on January 7th, 2010 11.52 am
Yep.. and the economic one is none other than Dr Goh Keng Swee.
[i]20) Donaldson on January 7th, 2010 4.02 pm 19) prettyplace on January 7th, 2010 11.52 am
Singapore clearly had 2 fathers.
1 Economic and another for Human Rights.
Yep.. and the economic one is none other than Dr Goh Keng Swee.
[/i]
laulee should have migrated and if dr gohkengswee was in charged
today we are number 1 asian tiger lioa…
now what are we?
number 1 MOUSE with a tale that can run upon a sinkin ship…
don’t believed? try speakin in romanian language..
Г-н Laulee трябва да са преминали и ако д-Р Gohkengswee беше заредена днес ние сме номер 1 азиатски тигър lioa… Сега Какво сме ние? Номер 1 мишката с приказка, което може да работи при потъващ кораб… Не смята, че? Да се опитате да говорите в румънски език