“If you have land, you have everything,” said Economic Freedom Fighters’ leader Julius Malema, who told a Botshabelo church meeting over the weekend that “the demand for land starts today.”

Sadly, Malema is wrong. To see just how far off-track he is leading his followers, all they need do is hop on a jet plane and visit Singapore, or, if that’s beyond their means, visit a local library or just Google ‘Singapore’.

Singapore has almost no land. When it was forcibly ejected from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, it was just over 580sq kms in size – various land reclamation projects have taken that to 716 sq kms. That’s less than half the size of the modern Johannesburg Municipal area, which comes in at 1,645 sq kms. But unlike Johannesburg, and South Africa more generally, nor did Singapore have any other natural resources to draw on: no gold, diamonds, coal, agriculture, winelands, tourism industry, manufacturing, financial services or anything else. Nothing. It was a very humid ramshackle city with a few very rich people and a large number of very poor.

At the point of Singapore’s independence, its average annual income per head was around US$500. Six decades later, that has grown to US$51,000, or substantially over half a million rand per person, per year. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s consistently ranked among the Top 10 global economies, nor that more and more global corporations are choosing Singapore as their headquarters.

Of course, if land was everything, none of this would be true, would it?

So what did Singapore get right – and why is Mr Malema so very wrong?

First and most important, Singapore’s rulers realised that with no resources of any kind, they would have to rely on their wits. Education, backed by sound government policy, an extraordinary ability to execute that policy, an alliance with both the local communists and trade unions, all driven by a relentless meritocracy. For example, only the very best and brightest are selected for government service, and they are then paid as much, if not more, than they would earn in the private sector. A very senior government official will draw a salary of US$2 million, but will also be highly qualified, often to PhD level, and held very accountable.

Singapore and its legendary Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew also understood at independence that no-one owed them anything. There would be no hand outs from former colonial powers or aid from western agencies; in fact, if Singapore wanted to prosper, it would have to open its doors to the world and welcome the able and the talented. No protectionism or bans on foreign ownership there. Since independence, its population has grown from just over a million people to around 5.3 million, of whom 1.5 million are expatriates, migrants or foreign workers.

Leadership has been paramount. Not just Lee Kuan Yew, but the people around him, have demonstrated an ability to think things through, establish priorities, announce the right plans and stick to them. Singapore’s government is famous for its discipline and fiscal prudence.

“It is a lesson in leadership, planning, continuous innovation, commercial logic and using its only natural resource – its people and minds – to best effect,” says one of South Africa’s most able and astute international commentators, Greg Mills, director of the Brenthurst Foundation and author of the magisterial new book, Why States Recover. In fact, I owe Mr Mills a debt of gratitude because many of the facts I quote above come from the chapter on Singapore in his book.

It’s a chapter which appears in Part 3 of the book, a section Mills calls “Illustrations of Recovery”. However, he opens with a section called “Pathologies and Threads of Failure”, which lists a number of well known failures: among them, Argentina, Kenya, Nigeria, Tunisia, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It’s worth noting that every single one of these ‘fragile states’ has plenty of land, so once again we realise that to say ‘land is everything’ is a fallacy. Land by itself is nothing. It’s what you do with it that counts, and how you enrich and educate the people you serve.

Singapore and many of these weak states started down the independence road at more or less the same time. The contrast between them now could not be more stark, so much so that it could even be argued that land is not ‘everything’, as Mr Malema would have his disciples believe, and that land without the brains to use it is a curse.