In this final extract from the book, From Third World to First, Angelo Izama brings ex-Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s observations of World leaders in Asia and Africa

In this slightly edited extract, Lee Kuan Yew recounts meeting Mama Miria Obote, [UPC Party President and wife to then President Milton Obote] and how a conversation with her symbolised the tragedy of Uganda's post independence history

.................................................

I remembered how the communists in the trade unions would keep me sitting for long hours on hard wooden backless benches. Then, after all my exhausted noncommunist supporters had left and we were in the minority, they would take the vote. The Commonwealth leaders were seated in comfortable armchairs, but the thermostat was malfunctioning and the air-conditioning was too cold in the early hours of the morning. To adjourn would mean everybody getting renewed energy, building up more steam for ever-longer speeches. I decided to carry on and everyone stayed. All speakers from Africa had the satisfaction of being heard; no leader was stopped from saying his piece meant for home consumption.

When discussions resumed a few hours later "on the security of the Indian Ocean", the African leaders were all absent and the work was soon done. It was punishing to have to listen to repetitious speeches made at a tangent to each other. Since then, I have sympathised with those who chaired international conferences where delegates come with prepared speeches, determined to say their piece regardless of what had already been said.

Although the conference did cover all items on the agenda, the press concentrated mainly on the controversy over arms for South Africa.

Disappointment
Privately, over drinks, Edward Heath [British Prime Minister] expressed his disappointment at the public airing of many confidential or secret exchanges between heads of government. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau agreed, regretting that the African leaders tended to adopt UN diplomatese.

I said this was inevitable when Third World leaders were influencing each other at so many international conferences where rhetoric and hyperbole were standard fare. I added that all first-generation independence leaders were charismatic speakers, but their administrations seldom followed up with the implementation.

As chairman, I gained insights into the backstage operations of a Commonwealth conference. It was the informal, bilateral, and small caucus sessions between key leaders that determined the outcome of the conference. Arnold Smith, who in 1962 had given me dinner in Moscow when he was Canada's ambassador, had been secretary-general of the Commonwealth for more than five years.

He had intimate knowledge of the personalities and positions of the leaders attending. Together we told the African leaders privately that they could never expect Ted Heath to climb down publicly. We convened two sessions, restricted to leaders, to endorse compromises Smith had brokered.

Resolutions
The formal resolutions in the full conference were settled at these smaller meetings. At the end of the meeting, after all the histrionics, the secretary-general got the Third World leaders to understand that the guts of the Commonwealth were in economic, social, and cultural cooperation, and that depended on funding mainly from the developed old Commonwealth-Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Commonwealth cooperation would end if the donors found the cost-benefit ratio unfavorable. With tact and skill, Smith persuaded the Africans and Asians not to push issues to the breaking point. Sonny Ramphal, the Guyanan foreign minister who took over from Smith in 1975, showed even greater skill in letting the Third World leaders have their rhetoric while he kept the road show going by making sure the cost-benefit equation kept the donors engaged.

Zimbabwe and apartheid occupied much time at every conference. For most of them, unless I looked up the minutes, I would not remember the issues of the day that agitated the leaders at that time. But I have carried unforgettable vignettes of meetings and conversations from each conference. I [remember]Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the hero who had opposed Pakistan and led East Pakistan to independence as Bangladesh. He arrived in style at Ottawa in his own aircraft.

When I landed, I saw a parked Boeing 707 with "Bangladesh" emblazoned on it. When I left, it was still standing on the same spot, idle for eight days, getting obsolescent without earning anything. As I left the hotel for the airport, two huge vans were being loaded with packages for the Bangladeshi aircraft. At the conference, Mujibur Rahman had made a pitch for aid to his country.

Any public relations firm would have advised him not to leave his special aircraft standing for eight whole days on the parking apron. The fashion of the time was for leaders of the bigger Third World countries to travel in their own aircraft. All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Eraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force.

Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's Third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country," giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.

In 1979,1 made my third visit to Lusaka. The first, in 1964, was during my African tour of 17 capitals, and the second in 1970, was for the Non-Aligned Summit. Since 1970, Zambia's economy had declined. We were entertained at State House, where I had stayed in 1964 as the houseguest of the last governor. It had lost its bloom.

There were fewer deer and exotic birds in the grounds, and the big house itself did not have that spick-and-span look of British colonial government houses. We were housed in the same chalets as in 1970, dotted around the conference hall, which had been built for them by Yugoslavia, a fellow member of the Non-Aligned Movement. The conference hall and chalets had not been much used since 1970 and showed it, but had just been refurbished and furnished at great expense, with furniture flown in from Spain.

Poor catering
The catering at the chalet where we stayed was a disaster. They had trained young students as cooks. Our cook's total repertoire was bacon and eggs or just soft-boiled eggs for breakfast, steak for lunch, and steak for dinner. There was plenty of liquor and wines, far more than we needed. Everything was in short supply.

The shops were empty. Imported toiletries were absent and there was little by way of local substitutes. [My wife] saw women queuing for essentials. [She bought a souvenir] to remind us that Zambia was a single-commodity economy, copper, and its price had not kept up with the prices of oil and other imports. They had no foreign exchange, and their currency was rapidly depreciating.

Prime Minister Kenneth Kaunda's major preoccupation was politics, black versus white politics, not the economics of growth for Zambia. He remained as president until the 1990s when, to his credit, he conducted a fair election and lost. After Kaunda left, the lot of Zambians did not improve much.

My most memorable encounter at the Melbourne conference in October 1981 was with an Indian in the coffee room. We were the only two seeking refreshments. I asked if he was with the Indian delegation. No, he was the leader of the delegation for Uganda, representing President Milton Obote, who could not come. I was surprised (Indians had been persecuted by Idi Amin for a decade and had fled Uganda) and asked if he had returned to Uganda. No, his family had settled in London and he was the Ugandan High Commissioner in London. He had left during Idi Amin's rule.

I asked what had happened to the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament who in January 1964 had given me and my delegation a reception at Parliament House, Kampala. He was a Sikh with a turban, proud of his stone-faced Parliament House. By coincidence, the former Speaker was coming to Melbourne to meet him the next day. He had been forced to leave Uganda and had settled in Darwin, where he became a magistrate.

I was sad. Uganda could have done with more such people, and not just as Speakers, to give dynamism to the Ugandan economy as the Sikhs have done in many other countries, including Singapore. He had been a casualty of the 1971 coup when Idi Amin deposed Milton Obote while he was in Singapore.

Meeting Miria Obote
In Delhi two years later, I was seated next to Mrs Obote at the queen's dinner. She gave me another facet of the Ugandan tragedy while recounting how in the 1971 coup she with her three children had escaped from Kampala to Nairobi. They were sent back. They escaped again and spent years in exile in Dar-es-Salaam. She returned to Uganda in 1980, a year after Idi Amin was deposed.

Milton Obote, now president again, was a much sadder and more subdued man. I caught a glimpse of the magnitude of the Ugandan disaster from my conversation with his wife. She had discovered that the people had changed, no longer willing to work for what they needed. After nine years of brutalities, lawlessness, and vicious-ness under Idi Amin, people simply grabbed what they wanted. They had lost all the habits that made for civilised living.