ROLE OF PARTY POLITICS AND LEADERSHIP RECRUITMENT IN THE SINGAPORE DEVELOPMENT

Singapore is one of Asia's "exceptional" success stories, transforming itself from a developing country to a modern industrial economy in one generation. In the last decade or so, Singapore's party politics and leadership system has remained consistently at or near the top of most major world leadership ranking systems. The thrust of this paper is to examine the roles of party politics and leadership recruitment in the effort of Singapore to achieve development: How both factors had helped to put in place a proven and "enviable system of government". This paper essentially relied on content analysis by using secondary source of data to embark on the exercise. The structural functionalist theory was employed to justify the argument. The findings of this paper revealed that Singapore's party politics and leadership recruitment scheme have brought about an open system, which remained consistent with the quality of its government, its development achievements, policy effectiveness as well as its competiveness in political participation. It was further revealed that these were made possible through investment in human capital, especially in education and building a culture of accountability, honesty and responsive leadership. The paper recommends among other things the adoption of honest and efficient leadership, objective mechanism for leadership recruitment and implementation of well thought out policies that will not only benefit the citizens presently but will ensure the future sustainability of the nation