When Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto touches down in Singapore this Sunday (June 15) and meets the city-state’s top leaders on Monday, including a call on President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and a retreat with Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, he and the elites accompanying him would do well to leave their arrogance in the jet. It’s long past time they stopped taking Singapore’s nation-building and dazzling development for granted.
Despite the island’s spectacular success and a recipe as clear as day, Indonesian leaders have always found excuses not to take notes. Too small, they say. Too simple. Not as complex, not as diverse, not as rich in islands, cultures, and ethnicities. They shrug it off as just a little red dot. So said B.J. Habibie. A flick on the map. A mosquito next to the buffalo.
But the real reason is neither size nor diversity. The real reason is hollow pride, intellectual laziness, a corrupted moral compass, and a ruling class that prefers slogans to systems. The kind of national narcissism that mistakes noise for greatness and volume for vision.
Seven months into his presidency, with questions swirling around his sincerity, commitment, and capability, Prabowo finds himself on a diplomatic runway and a moral crossroads. If he listens with more humility than hubris, Singapore might offer him something his military pedigree never taught him: the power of discipline, strategy, and modesty in building a nation.
He should remember how Singapore began, not as a city of glass towers and billion-dollar sovereign funds, but with Lee Kuan Yew choking back tears at a press conference in 1965. It had just been expelled from the Malaysian Federation. No hinterland. No resources. A largely uneducated population. Unemployment. Squalor. Racial tension. And neighbours too busy bickering to bother helping.
Lee inherited a GDP per capita of around US$400. Today, Singapore boasts over US$84,000, a figure so high it feels fictional. But it’s no fairytale. It’s the outcome of a ruthless, methodical, disciplined will.
The island was fragile at birth. A port with no provinces. A promise surrounded by peril. But Lee saw in it a seed. And the future of that seed would be shaped by merit, not myth.
His cabinet meetings were war rooms of policy. He paid civil servants not just enough, but generously, so they couldn’t be bought. He enforced integrity with the intensity of a convert. He didn’t just speak of law and order; he institutionalised them. He didn’t romanticise multiculturalism; he managed it like a ticking bomb.
He turned to English not to erase identity, but to bind a fragmented society with a lingua franca that connected, rather than divided. He built industrial estates, airports, and shipping ports, not for ribbon-cuttings or vanity headlines, but as part of a coherent, long-range plan.
Indonesia has its own version of bold dreams: the new capital in Nusantara, infrastructure corridors, digital governance. But unless it matches Singapore’s sense of discipline and strategic coherence, they will remain what many policies here have always been—half-built promises and full-blown disasters.
Lee didn’t indulge in populism. He didn’t chase polls. He didn’t trade vision for applause. His housing quotas engineered harmony. His bilingual education enforced unity. His national service instilled obligation. Policy was poetry with backbone.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia, bureaucrats are being told to clock out at 4pm in the name of “efficiency” and budget cuts. Essential public spending, on health, education, research—slashed under the guise of discipline. But discipline without purpose is theatre. And theatre, no matter how grand, does not build nations.
Singapore, without minerals, oil, or forests, became a global shipping giant, a financial hub, a data haven, and an aviation gateway. It welcomed foreign investment without surrendering its sovereignty. It remained small, but never acted small.
Indonesia, blessed with everything Singapore lacks, such as abundant land, a massive population, vast natural resources, still struggles to build clean toilets in its schools and decent roads in its villages. Because its leadership too often looks outward to perform, and inward only to extract.
Lee Kuan Yew made hard choices. He sacrificed popularity for posterity. He went after corruption with surgical steel. He curbed freedom, yes. But not in service of the few. He built trust, not just towers. Prabowo, in his first 100 days, has promised free meals and efficient bureaucracy. But the cuts to education and health have triggered outrage. “Dark Indonesia,” say the students on the streets. And right they are. Boldness needs breadth, not just bark.
Singapore has always told its story with discipline. It began with tears and was written in sweat. Its mythos is made of scarcity, discipline, and meritocracy. Indonesia’s myths, meanwhile, rest on old volcanoes, borrowed revolutions, and clichés about unity in diversity. But stories must evolve, not just echo.
When Prabowo sits down with Singapore’s new leaders, he should realise he’s not visiting a fluke. Singapore is not an anomaly. It is a masterclass. And its lessons are not secrets.
Can Prabowo build a bureaucracy of merit, not family trees? Can he invest in schools and scientists instead of cutting their budgets to balance spreadsheets? Can he write a new Indonesian narrative, one that doesn’t glorify the past but imagines the future?
From US$400 in 1965 to over US$84,000 today, Singapore’s journey was not built on miracles. It was built on method. If Prabowo wants to be remembered as more than a general with civilian clothes, he must learn what it takes to govern like Lee Kuan Yew.
This little red dot offers a disciplined poem. May Indonesia, in all its vastness, learn to rhyme not with rage, but with reason. The next stanza is Prabowo’s to write. Let’s hope he brings a pen, not just a parade.
Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
