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Founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s grandson and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s son Li Hongyi has founded a new unit within Singapore’s Government Technology Agency, with its own branding, website and style. GovTech is a statutory board of the Singapore government, under the Prime Minister’s Office.
The son of PM Lee Lee and Ho Ching, the CEO of Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek, Li Hongyi has been employed by GovTech for over six years now. He started out as a consultant and was promoted to the position of Deputy Director in January last year. Hongyi now serves as the director of a unit at the heart of GovTech he founded, called Open Government Products.
Speaking at the GovInsider Live summit at the United Nations Asia HQ last month, Li said that he founded the new unit as he believes the Government can learn much from how big tech companies innovate quickly. He added: “We know how to have good technology, and we know we have big problems.”
While Hongyi’s Open Government Products unit shares GovTech’s resources, manpower and ethos, it has its own website and branding. The unit, which works to build and deploy software products rapidly and scale smaller services quickly, has so far built services like ISOMER, FormSG and Parking.sg.
ISOMER is a tool that allows anyone to easily create a standardised government website, with user-friendly templates. The websites are fast, secure, mobile-friendly, and supports visually impaired users.
Parking.sg – an application that allows drivers in Singapore to pay for parking digitally – is perhaps the most well-known product Hongyi has been associated with. The app, which was launched in 2017, costs the Government about $5000 a month to run.
He joked:“We’ve actually lost money doing this – because we’ve now given back $5 million worth of parking fees that we otherwise would have unethically collected from people for time that they actually didn’t end up using.”
Every January, team members also pause all non-urgent work and participate in a hackathon. Hongyi said that the hackathon helps his team to “generate a lot of ideas that you would never have found if you just waited for instructions from what is traditionally senior leadership.”
He also believes that it is important to include as many team members in the creative process as possible. Li said: “A leader has to support and facilitate as many of the good people you hire as possible to spend time thinking about the problem, so you maximise the amount of creative brain power.”
There is also speculation that Li may enter politics in the future. In 2017, his paternal uncle and aunt, Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Wei Ling, accused Lee Hsien Loong of grooming him for politics. Li responded to the allegations and claimed that he really has no interest in politics.
Lee Hsien Yang’s eldest son and Hongyi’s cousin, Li Shengwu, later noted that Hongyi’s comments on a potential entry into Singapore politics is “vague” as he told the press:“He only said he has no interest in politics, but my uncle Lee Hsien Loong also once said he wasn’t interested in politics when he was in his 20s. These words can easily be taken back.”
Since then, speculation that certain ruling party members have been appointed to mentor Hongyi as a potential elections candidate has been rife.
Respected international publication, the Nikkei Asian Review, said that Heng Swee Keat is expected to mentor Li Hongyi to be Singapore’s potential fifth-generation Prime Minister, just like how second-generation PM Goh Chok Tong mentored Lee Hsien Loong.
Mr Goh succeeded founding PM Lee Kuan Yew and has been seen as a “seatwarmer” PM since he paved the way for Lee Kuan Yew’s son Lee Hsien Loong to take office.
The Nikkei Asian Review article asserted that the recent appointment of Heng Swee Keat as the PAP’s first assistant secretary-general – which is seen as confirmation that he will become the next PM – “promises no break” from the PAP’s usual pattern.
