Cleaning up Singapore's act

Top civil servant Lee Ek Tieng and his team made the Singapore River pristine
clarissa oon Straits Times 28 Nov 11;

It is hard to imagine, looking at the pristine, odourless water and chi- chi restaurants lining the river bank, that the Singapore River was once a cesspool of garbage and fuel oil.

Cluttering up the river mouth in the 1970s were hundreds of bumboats ferrying goods from warehouses along the river to cargo ships out at sea.

About 4,000 squatters lived in unsewered tenement buildings along the river bank. Hawkers and vegetable sellers thronged the five-foot-way. Their daily waste flowed into the Singapore River.


It took a massive government effort to clean up the river, led by then Environment Ministry Permanent Secretary Lee Ek Tieng.

A civil engineer by training, he remembers then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's public challenge to him and his team in 1977. It was to make fishing and other recreational activities possible along the Singapore River and Kallang Basin in 10 years' time. The Kallang Basin was being polluted by nearby pig and duck farms and cottage industries.

There was widespread scepticism as to whether the clean-up could succeed.

The 78-year-old civil engineer says with a grin: 'Many of my friends told me, 'Look, you're in for a hard time, you know. It's cheaper to buy fish and put them in the river every week'.'

He pulled it off within the deadline and was one of 10 civil servants awarded a gold medal in 1987 for transforming the river. At that time, he was also chairman of the Public Utilities Board (now the national water agency PUB), a position he held until 2000.

After cleaning up the river, he went on to hold important financial positions such as Permanent Secretary of the Finance Ministry and managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. He was head of the Civil Service from 1994 till his retirement in 1999.

However, his biggest contributions were arguably in environmental protection and developing new water resources.

As PUB chairman, he commissioned a study in 1999 that gave birth to NEWater, the high-quality recycled water that now meets 30 per cent of Singapore's total water demand.

The name, a clever sell, was his idea, too. 'No point having a very good product if you are unable to get people to accept it,' he says. At his request, the interview is held in a no-frills meeting room in The Straits Times' office.

'I recall reading many years ago that in branding and advertising, there are two very powerful words: free and new. Something 'new' will always attract attention. The word NEWater is neutral, it doesn't tell you the source of the water. Very important,' he adds.

As for his other major achievement - the Singapore River clean-up - 'from an engineering point of view, we thought we could do it, no problem'.

'The biggest worry my colleagues and I had was whether we could get two things. One, political backing for some of the tricky problems such as moving out the hawkers and squatters. The other was if we could get the full cooperation of other government agencies. And looking back, frankly, we had very few problems,' he says.

His team stepped up programmes to find public housing for squatters and move street hawkers to hawker centres. A minority were unhappy, but most accepted hawker centres, which had proper sewerage and daily garbage collection. The point, he says, is 'you never throw out an unlicensed street hawker and say, 'You go and look for another job', we always give you an alternative'.

Agencies such as the Housing and Development Board (HDB) and the Port of Singapore Authority pitched in, the latter moving the bumboats to a new lighter anchorage at Pasir Panjang.

As the 10-year deadline approached, his tensest moment - ironically - came when the last source of pollution was removed. That was the relocation of Chinatown street hawkers who were slaughtering pythons, ducks and chickens with the waste blood going into drains connected to the Singapore River.

'It's just like how a doctor gives you medicine for your cough, but will the medicine work? You've identified all the pollution sources, now the last major source of organic pollution is gone, but will the Singapore River really turn clean?' he says.

He got the answer within a week when the stench disappeared from the river. It was then dredged and the river walls repaired - the final act of the clean-up.

Today, much of what he engineered as the Environment Ministry's top civil servant or Permanent Secretary from 1972 to 1986 is taken for granted - namely, that streets and public eating places are clean, mosquitoes and rodents are under control, and domestic and industrial waste water captured in sewers are treated properly before being discharged into the sea.

PUB chairman Tan Gee Paw, 68, says: 'These were pressing issues in Singapore as a young nation coming out from the poverty of the past. Ek Tieng truly set the pace for a standard of environmental public health that is unrivalled in this region to this day.'

Mr Tan has known Mr Lee since the late 1960s, when they were engineers in the Public Works Department (PWD), which handled drainage and sewerage.

But the highest accolade yet paid to Mr Lee comes from Mr Lee Kuan Yew who wrote in volume two of his memoirs: 'There would have been no clean and green Singapore without Lee Ek Tieng.' The former prime minister said his vision of a spruced-up nation could not have been realised without the latter's engineering know-how.

What does Mr Lee think of the former PM's praise? 'He's very kind and over-generous. I think, never mind me, my team of people in Environment appreciate it very much that something we did over a period of 10 years is recognised,' he says.

Most Singaporeans will not know him, but this does not bother him.

'Engineers are not very sentimental people. We are different from architects. I always like to take a dig at architects; unlike them, we have little to show, no fancy building,' he quips.

'Humble', 'approachable' and 'hands-on' are how longtime associates describe the man whose first job in 1958 was overseeing night soil stations as an engineer with the now-defunct City Council. In the days before flush toilets, buckets of faecal matter or 'night soil' from households were collected and taken to these stations to be emptied and washed.

By the late 1960s, he was in charge of planning and designing a modern sewerage system in the PWD.

In 1972, he rose to head the Environment Ministry, which he started, bringing together the PWD's sewerage and engineering services and environmental public health functions under the Ministry of Health, such as hawkers and pest control.

Being a top civil servant never went to his head. 'After office hours, he would play ping-pong with the workshop mechanic or anyone who wanted a game with him,' says Mr Daniel Wang, 68, a former commissioner of public health who worked under him at the PWD and Environment Ministry.

Though in the hot seat of policy planning, Mr Lee kept in touch with ground operations, often making unannounced spot-checks on refuse collection trucks or sewerage treatment plants.

Mr Chen Hung, 77, the ministry's former director of environmental engineering and sewerage, says: 'He is a meticulous and factual, no-nonsense type of person. He never behaved like a boss, he was always one of the team.'

Mr Lee admits that he has always preferred getting his hands dirty to writing up policy papers.

The second youngest of eight children of a Methodist pastor enjoyed repairing shoes as a child. He was the family handyman, scaling the roof of their bungalow in Serangoon Gardens - where he still lives - to fix the television antenna.

He was in the first batch of engineering students who graduated from the University of Malaya in Singapore in 1958.

His first high-profile gig came when he was appointed head of the newly formed Air Pollution Unit in 1970, after being interviewed by Mr Lee Kuan Yew in his office for nearly two hours.

Early on in Singapore's industrialisation, the Government had identified air pollution as a potential problem if factory emissions were not brought under control. Hence the unit, set up amid a blaze of publicity under the Prime Minister's Office. Its functions were later transferred to the Environment Ministry.

It was at the unit that the engineer honed his skills dealing with people and other government departments.

He recalls a hairy situation involving a ceramics factory permitted by the Ministry of National Development's planning department to operate in Hillview Estate, a residential area in Bukit Batok.

He says: 'The factory was emitting a white plume of dust because it didn't have proper filters. I used to get telephone calls on Sunday mornings from very angry residents.' He managed to persuade the department to offer the factory an alternative site.

Whether curbing air pollution or overhauling the Singapore River, he was able to bring about good cooperation between different agencies. He attributes this to the just-do-it mindset of the civil service in the early days. 'We tried to avoid politicking and too much debating, to just be objective and get on with the job.'

Times have changed and Singaporeans are more demanding. He says: 'In the current situation, you've got to debate, consult. Everybody needs an explanation.'

But he no longer has to agonise over such things. The man, who at the height of his career was juggling five different portfolios, can finally stop and smell the roses. He credits his wife, Patricia, 74, an information officer-turned-housewife, for bringing up their two sons, now in their 40s. They have three grandchildren.

Trim and healthy from regular golf and gym sessions, he keeps his mind active by reading newspapers and current affairs magazines and scanning the daily headlines on his iPad.

His biggest worry these days is no longer sewerage, but the fact that he recently lost 5kg from exercising. 'All my pants couldn't fit, I had to buy new ones.'

He relishes the slower pace and relative anonymity. He recalls a recent episode when one of his grandsons went on a school trip to a NEWater plant.

'The boy told the teacher, 'My grandfather gave the name NEWater'. The teacher didn't believe him. Not that I mind at all,' he says with a laugh.

Background story

'The night soil station at People's Park was one of the most smelly parts of Singapore in the 1960s. But I got used to it. It's a job, somebody's got to do it anyway'

On his first job overseeing night soil stations, where buckets of household waste were emptied and washed

'I always told my officers, especially the health inspectors: You cannot be everywhere all the time, so take complaints from Singaporeans as feedback or intelligence. There is litter here, people dumping rubbish there, go over and get it cleaned up'

On his attitude towards complaints from the public

'NEWater is very good for whisky. You know why? Because the water is very soft water, it's got very few minerals and therefore no taste, so it doesn't add any taste to the purity of the whisky. Not that I drink a lot but I tried it myself'

On the finer points of NEWater

'Trust, but verify... former US President Ronald Reagan said that. You've got to trust people, you cannot be suspicious all the time. But you also have to verify'

On the motto he lives by

'The problem is not literally that Singapore has become too clean. It's that people have become too cleanliness- conscious. We are too critical about little specks of dirt here and there'