When as a child I first met Lee Kuan Yew in the early 1980s, he was very much in his prime, addressing a huge noon-time crowd in an election rally in downtown Singapore. When I last saw him in a banquet a few years ago, he was holding forth in a question-and-answer session. In both instances, Lee’s undaunted forcefulness and confident forthrightness was almost palpable.

And that was how Lee ran Singapore, the then precarious island nation he created half a century ago amid gathering regional tensions. When Lee passed away on Monday, he had hammered Singapore into one of the world’s indispensable economic hubs.

Singapore’s world-class achievements led some to coin the term “Singapore model,” which has at its core a strong but elected government which is thus empowered to supposedly look out for the interests of the people with focused attention. A powerful government, with timely policy revisions along the way, looks set to hold sway in Singapore for some time to come, even after Lee’s passing.

…The author is a senior fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.