President Uhuru: Why I draw inspiration from ex-Singapore leader

With the passing of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore, we mourn one of the modern world's foremost nation builders and visionaries.

The story of Singapore under Lee is well known. The island state grew from a poor colonial backwater and foreign military base to first-world status in a single generation.

No leader in the modern era has achieved so much, so quickly. Today Singapore has the world's ninth highest per capita income. The journey travelled to achieve this is captured in his book, From Third World to First, which detailed the transformation in Premier Lee's characteristically direct way.

Singapore was so challenged at independence in 1963 that it did not even have water resources of its own – it had to depend on neighbouring Malaysia.

Lee placed strong emphasis on rapid economic growth, supported local entrepreneurship and maintained close ties with China to achieve his aims. His initial steps left many critics doubtful.

But he never lost focus, and modern Singapore is his reward. Its journey from underdeveloped colonial outpost to Asian tiger economy is an epic of nation building that will thrill and inspire thinking Kenyans and other citizens of the developing world for generations to come.

Premier Lee leaves one of history's greatest legacies – one of the world's most prosperous, efficient and meritocratic polities.

His watchwords were stability and progress, built on a firm economic foundation and an ethos of self-reliance. Western liberal ideas of freedom took a far second place in his priorities. In fact, a number of Western critics of Lee's nation-building priorities found themselves at the receiving end of defamation suits.

Domestic foes who were urged on by foreign interlopers were dealt with, always within the confines of Singaporean law.

Premier Lee visited Kenya for the first time as Prime Minister of Singapore in February 1964 and held talks with President Jomo Kenyatta. He led a 12-member Malaysian Goodwill Mission to 17 African countries (Singapore was then still a part of Malaysia).

It was an interesting time in both Kenyan and Singaporean history. For both our nations, enjoying their first year of freedom, it was "morning yet on creation day".

There were nations to build. The young Prime Minister Lee, then aged barely 36, briefed Mzee Kenyatta, then in his mid-70s, on Malaysia's position in a major dispute with Indonesia.

Mzee Kenyatta was also the mediator in the Congo crisis at that time. The friendship forged in the morning of our nations' lives has endured. The builder of modern Singapore had no room for corruption. Under Lee, and after him, there was zero tolerance of corruption. The result is one of the world's most admired business and financial centres, a place where corruption has no nooks and crannies in which to hide or thrive.

I have no hesitation in declaring that Premier Lee's life and life's work are role models and great inspirations for me.

Many nations, large and small, young and ancient, have learned from the global role model of Singapore, including China. Under the great reformist Deng Xiaoping, more than 22,000 Chinese officials were sent to Singapore to study its processes and procedures.

Indeed, to this day, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy teaches Singapore's unique blend of meritocratic and efficient government and Civil Service methods, lessons to which Kenya needs to apply itself just now.

Lee's example is all the more profound for having been achieved in a time of Cold War and the great ideological interferences of both East and West that included invasive cultural and governance imperialism.

One of Lee's most memorable observations was contained in a 2007 interview with The New York Times: "To understand Singapore and why it is what it is, you've got to start off with the fact that it's not supposed to exist.

"To begin with, we don't have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors: a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny. So, history is a long time. I've done my bit."

Unlike Singapore at the outset, modern Kenya has long had the ingredients and elementary factors of a nation.

However, our Singapore-like economic take-off moment has been too long postponed by bad politics.

As the world mourns our distinguished elder, it is time to reflect on his leadership and its achievements.

Kenya has learned from Singapore.

With the transformation and consolidation of public services through the establishment of Huduma Kenya, and the launching of several major infrastructural and other projects, Kenya is now ready for a socio-economic leap forward similar to Singapore's under the late Lee.

Kenyans, too, yearn for honest, effective and efficient nation-building that will transform this country for the greater good of the next generations to come.

We bid Lee adieu and hope to emulate his example.