Ngiam Tong Dow, pioneering Singapore bureaucrat who bemoaned ‘little Lee Kuan Yews’ in civil service, dies aged 83
- The public service stalwart’s career encompassed a number of high offices in service of the city state’s founding prime minister and his successor
- He was among a handful of establishment insiders who publicly aired their grievances, and yet were left relatively unscathed by the People’s Action Party
Ngiam Tong Dow, the pioneering Singaporean civil servant who served four decades in the highest levels of the city state’s bureaucracy and on retirement bemoaned creeping “elite arrogance” among its latter-day mandarinate, has died at age 83.
Ngiam’s family told The Straits Times he had been ill for the last 4.5 years.
A first-generation Singaporean born to a court interpreter father and a Hainanese mother who worked as a washerwoman, Ngiam won a bursary to study economics at the University of Malaya. Later in his career he obtained a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard University.
In 1970 – five years after Singapore gained full independence – Ngiam became the nascent republic’s youngest ever permanent secretary, in the Ministry of Communications, at age 33.
Following a stint as chairman of the Economic Development Board, he took on senior positions in the finance, trade and industry, and national development ministries.
