That Malaysia would bring prosperity, a common market, peace, harmony. We were quickly disillusioned and it became an albatross round our necks.
Very sad. But instructive episode in our political education.
I had had enough of Malaysia. I just wanted to get out. I could see no future in it. The political cost was dreadful and the economic benefits did not exist.
So I cut the bird from our neck.
Without permission.
Lee found out in 1994. Nearly thirty years later.
He was writing his memoirs and he reviewed the Albatross documents and he realised that I had never pressed Razak for the looser rearrangement he had asked me to pursue.
I had, from the start, gone for a clean break.
𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐈 𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦, 𝐥𝐞𝐭 𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬.
I was born in Malacca in 1918. Peranakan family. My father managed a rubber plantation. My mother came from the family that produced Tan Cheng Lock and his son Tan Siew Sin, who would later become my lifelong political opponent and, to my lasting irritation, my cousin.
We moved to Singapore when I was two. I grew up on the Pasir Panjang rubber estate. My family spoke English and Malay at home. Church services on Sunday in Malay.
I went to Anglo Chinese School. Then Raffles College, where I met Hon Sui Sen. Later, in London, at the School of Economics, I met the other men who would shape the future. Razak was one of them. So were Lee Kuan Yew and Toh Chin Chye.
After the war, I went to the London School of Economics.
Earned a doctorate.
Returned to Singapore as a civil servant in the Social Welfare Department.
That is where I learned what poverty looks like. Not in a textbook. In a file. In a face. In the gap between what a government promises and what it delivers.
That gap made me a politician.
𝟏𝟗𝟓𝟗. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐭.
When the PAP won the election and I became Singapore's first Finance Minister, the treasury was projecting a $14 million deficit.
Businessmen thought the end of the world had arrived. The stock market collapsed. Capital fled. Several people left the country.
I cut civil service salaries.
Do you understand what that means?
The very people who had just elected us, the people who worked for the government, the people whose support we needed to survive, I cut their pay.
Because the alternative was bankruptcy.
By December, I delivered a surplus.
One million dollars. It was not much.
But it was black ink instead of red. And it told the world that this government would not spend its way to prosperity.
That was my first lesson in what leadership actually costs.
It costs the thing that is most convenient to keep.
𝐆𝐨𝐡'𝐬 𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐲.
In 1962, I started the development of the Jurong industrial estate on the western end of the island.
It was a swamp.
Let me be precise.
It was mud and mangrove and standing water and mosquitoes and the kind of ground that engineers look at and say "not here."
I said here.
I said build factories on this swamp. Lay roads. Run power. Bring water.
And then convince multinational corporations, who could invest anywhere in the world, to put their money in the mud on the edge of an island that might not exist as a country next year.
They called it Goh's Folly.
The cynics. The civil servants. The men who had never built anything and therefore knew exactly why nothing could be built.
Goh's Folly.
I said once, "The only way to avoid making mistakes is not to do anything. And that will be the ultimate mistake."
By 1968, Jurong had 300 factories and 21,000 workers.
By 1976, it had 650 factories and had become the backbone of Singapore's industrialisation.
Nobody calls it Goh's Folly anymore.
They call it Jurong.
And every Singaporean who has a job in manufacturing, in petrochemicals, in precision engineering, in the industrial economy that feeds this country?
Standing on ground that was once a swamp that nobody wanted.
Except me.
𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐲 𝟏𝟗𝟔𝟓. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦.
Now let me tell you about the room.
In mid July 1965, I sat with Razak in Kuala Lumpur. Also present were Ismail Abdul Rahman, Malaysia's Minister for Home Affairs.
The context was this.
Singapore had been part of Malaysia for two years. In those two years, there had been two race riots. Communal violence incited by extremists on both sides. The federal government's finance minister, my cousin Tan Siew Sin, had threatened to raise Singapore's revenue contribution from 40 to 60 percent. UMNO leaders had told me, to my face, that Lee Kuan Yew should step down as Prime Minister and that I should replace him.
They wanted a Singapore they could control.
I wanted a Singapore that was free.
I told Razak: the best thing would be to call it quits.
Razak did not disagree. The Tunku had already been thinking the same thing. He had written to Razak from London, where he was recovering from shingles, about the possibility of "hiving off" Singapore.
So the conversation was not whether. It was how.
The discussions were conducted in absolute secrecy.
Toh Chin Chye and Rajaratnam, two of our most senior leaders, were not told. Not until 7 August. Two days before separation. When Lee summoned them to Kuala Lumpur and showed them the documents.
They were devastated.
They refused to sign.
It took a personal letter from the Tunku himself, stating that there was "absolutely no other way," to convince them.
That is the part they do not teach you in school.
That on the night before Singapore became a country, two of its founding fathers were sitting in a room, reading a letter from the man who was expelling them, and weeping.
𝟗 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟏𝟗𝟔𝟓.
Singapore separated from Malaysia.
Lee wept on television.
I did not weep.
I will tell you why. Not because I was harder than him. Not because I felt less.
Because I had already done the grieving. I had grieved the merger months before, in hotel rooms and meeting rooms and in the back of cars driving between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
By the time it was announced, I had already moved past the loss and into the problem.
The problem was this.
We were now a country of two million people with no army, no hinterland, no natural resources, and a neighbour across the causeway who had just told us they did not want us.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭.
I became Minister for Interior and Defence.
There was no Singapore Armed Forces.
There were a few battalions and a volunteer corps and the withdrawing shadow of the British military, which had been our shield for a century and was now packing its bags.
I had to build an army from nothing.
Not in ten years. Not in five.
Now.
On 13 March 1967, I introduced the National Service Amendment Bill. It passed the next day.
Compulsory conscription for every able bodied male citizen aged eighteen.
Every son.
Every family.
I understood the weight of that. I was not a man who made decisions lightly. I read Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart. I subscribed to military journals. I studied Israel, a country smaller than ours that had built a citizen army out of necessity and survived.
But understanding the theory does not soften the reality.
The reality is that you are telling every mother in the country that her eighteen year old son now belongs, for two years, to the state.
That is not a policy.
That is a covenant.
And the only thing that justifies it is survival.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐞𝐥𝐬𝐞 𝐈 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭.
The Economic Development Board. 1961.
The Development Bank of Singapore. 1968. You know it as DBS.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore. 1971. I laid the policies that produced a stable Singapore dollar and preserved the purchasing power of every citizen.
The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. 1981. A sovereign wealth fund to invest the reserves.
It was unprecedented for a non commodity economy to have one. I did not care about precedent. I cared about the future.
But here is what people do not expect from me.
Sentosa. 1968. The Jurong Bird Park. 1971. The Singapore Zoo. 1973. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
I built these because one evening, early in the 1970s, I looked at what we had created and I felt something I did not expect.
Emptiness.
We had the factories. We had the army. We had the banks and the reserves and the institutions. But we had not given our people a reason to walk slowly. To sit. To watch a bird. To listen to music that had no economic purpose.
A nation that only works and never lives is not a nation.
It is a factory.
So I built the things that made a country worth living in.
Not because they were efficient. Because they were necessary.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝.
I will tell you something now that I never said publicly.
The Albatross file was not just about Malaysia.
It was about me.
The albatross in Coleridge's poem is a burden the sailor carries as penance for what he has done. He killed something beautiful, something that had brought his ship good winds, and the crew made him wear the corpse around his neck.
The albatross in Coleridge's poem is a burden the sailor carries as penance for what he has done. He killed something beautiful, something that had brought his ship good winds, and the crew made him wear the corpse around his neck.
I killed the merger.
The merger was supposed to bring Singapore prosperity. A common market. A hinterland. A future within something larger than ourselves.
I killed it because I could see that it was already dead. That what we were wearing around our necks was not a living partnership but a rotting carcass that would drag us under.
But killing it meant accepting that we were alone.
Two million people on a dot.
No army. No resources. No guarantee that the water from Johor would keep flowing. No guarantee that Indonesia would not invade. No guarantee that the economy I was trying to build on a swamp would survive its first decade.
I carried that.
Every day. Every decision. Every time I stood in front of a microphone or sat across from a foreign investor or signed a paper that committed the country to another gamble.
The albatross was not Malaysia.
The albatross was the knowledge that I had bet an entire nation on my own judgment. Without permission. Without consensus. Without the certainty that I was right.
And Goh Keng Swee carried it until the day he died.
𝟏𝟒 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟎.
Goh Keng Swee died at age 91.
Lee Kuan Yew's son, Lee Hsien Loong, said at my funeral: "A whole generation of Singaporeans has grown up enjoying the fruits of growth and prosperity, because one of our ablest sons decided to fight for Singapore's independence, progress and future."
Those are generous words.
But the word I hold closest is one he did not say.
𝘈𝘭𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴.
In December 2025, the Albatross File was finally declassified and published. The handwritten notes. The cabinet papers. The records of conversations that decided the fate of a nation.
Lee Hsien Loong said at the launch: "For those who lived through those times, each step was uncertain, each negotiation harrowing, each decision wrenching. Neither our founding leaders nor the people they led could be certain Singapore would survive, let alone thrive. It was, and still is, a miracle."
A miracle.
That is a kind word for the result of a decision made by a man sitting across from his old college friend, in a room in Kuala Lumpur, saying words he had not been told to say.
I stepped down from politics in 1984. They gave me the Order of Temasek the following year.
But the heaviest thing I ever wore was not a medal.
It was a bird.
And I wore it gladly.
Because the alternative was to let it hang around the neck of an entire nation.
Most Singaporeans know Lee Kuan Yew cried on television when Singapore separated from Malaysia.
Almost none of them know that the man who made that separation happen was sitting beside him, dry eyed, carrying a secret file called Albatross.
Goh Keng Swee did not cry because he had already mourned. He had mourned the merger in private, in meeting rooms and hotel corridors, long before the cameras switched on. And by the time it was announced, he had already moved past grief and into the work.
That is what it looks like when someone makes the hard call nobody else will make.
You do not get to grieve publicly.
You do not get to hesitate.
You do not get to say "I was told to do this."
You make the decision. You carry the weight. You accept that if you are wrong, history will remember you as the man who broke a country apart. And if you are right, history will call it a miracle and credit someone else.
Goh Keng Swee built your economy on a swamp. He built your army from nothing. He built your banks, your reserves, your industrial base, your zoo, your symphony orchestra.
And he separated your country from a federation that was strangling it, without permission, without consensus, without certainty.
Here is the question he leaves behind.
What is the decision you are avoiding because you are waiting for permission?
The call that everyone around you knows needs to be made, but nobody will make because the cost of being wrong is too visible and the reward of being right will be claimed by someone else.
What is your albatross?
The thing that is hanging around your neck, dragging you down, that everyone agrees is a problem but nobody will cut loose because cutting it loose means accepting that you are alone with the consequences.
Goh Keng Swee cut it.
He carried the weight.
And a country flew.
𝑺𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒅𝒆𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒐 𝒂𝒄𝒕.
It is whether to act alone.
