Duterte Fact Checks

FALSE: Duterte was Lee Kuan Yew’s inspiration for Singapore’s success

Rappler.com

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

FALSE: Duterte was Lee Kuan Yew’s inspiration for Singapore’s success
Duterte was only 14 years old when Lee took office as Singapore’s prime minister
Claim:

Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew credited President Rodrigo Duterte for being his inspiration in fostering growth and development in Singapore.

Facebook user Kate Palalay posted a graphic containing this claim. Right next to Lee’s photo, a quote attributed to him read: “Rodrigo Duterte was my inspiration for building Singapore from scratch.”

Palalay captioned her post, “Hindi natin kalahi pero proud siya. Ikaw? ARE YOU PROUD OF OUR PRECEDENT (sic) DuTER30?” (Not a Filipino but he’s proud. How about you? Are you proud of our President Duterte?)

Palalay also shared the graphic to several Facebook groups, such as Good News Duterte, DUTERTE PARA S BAYAN!, and PRELOVED CABANATUAN CITY.

Palalay posted the graphic on December 16, 2019, but it was flagged by Claim Check on Friday, August 14, for fact checkers to verify. Claim Check is Facebook’s monitoring tool that identifies potentially dubious content shared across the platform. The graphic was reported at least 12 times for containing false information.

Rating: FALSE
The facts:

Lee served as Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 until 1990. Duterte was only 14 years old when Lee took office. There are also no legitimate sources that confirm Lee said the quote attributed to him in the graphic.

During the latter part of Lee’s term, Duterte had not yet been elected president but was serving as Davao City’s vice mayor from 1986 to 1987, and then as mayor from 1988 to 1998. Lee died in March 2015, a year and 3 months before Duterte became president of the Philippines.

In the past, Duterte’s supporters had called him the “Lee Kuan Yew of the Philippines.” The Duterte administration also compared the Philippine president to Lee in terms of leadership style. (READ: PH on Human Rights Watch report: Duterte like Lee Kuan Yew)

This is not the first time Rappler debunked a false claim about Lee. In October 2019, a blog falsely quoted Lee as saying that “the Philippines’ version of democracy as of late is best called a government by stupid people, of stupid people.”

Another false quote surfaced in December 2019, which claimed that Lee said that “the Philippine media are ‘just a master of intrigues’.” – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

Keep us aware of suspicious Facebook pages, groups, accounts, websites, articles, or photos in your network by contacting us at factcheck@rappler.com. Let us battle disinformation one Fact Check at a time.

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!