One of the reasons Heng Swee Keat cites for stepping down from the Prime Ministership is that the “runway” would be too short for him given his age, and that the ideal candidate should be younger and able to plan “long-term” beyond or one or two electoral terms in a post-pandemic world.
Note that this is a political luxury not afforded in most liberal democracies around the world, one exclusive to Singapore given the PAP’s parliamentary dominance, where policymakers can conduct economic planning past the span of one electoral term, let alone two or three. In fact, one of the key problems of political democracy (and IMO the most salient) is that politicians have poor incentives to plan beyond their immediate electoral term.
A serious effort to solve crime for instance, might require a multi-pronged effort spanning several years of public investment in law enforcement, public education on drug use and urban housing renewal. However, a politician facing an election in the coming year would be irrational to pursue such a long-term policy since the benefits would not yet be noticeable to voters come Election Day, and therefore not politically fruitful.
Instead, the incumbent politician has higher incentives to pursue policies with short-term impact, irregardless of whether they are effective in the long-run. This is why politicians tend to ramp up stimulus spending, conduct more infrastructure building, or dish out welfare freebies on the eve of elections, where the benefits to voters can be easily measured, are tangible, and can be causally attributed to a benefactor, as a reminder of who's in charge and who to vote for. (These perverse incentives also affect the way politicians behave on their way out of office because political budgets lack residual claimancy unlike businesses)
In most cases, the benefits of good governance ("governance" not only in the political sense of the word, but the broad sense as used in the social sciences) can only be reaped in the long-term but the rules of democracy do not encourage and oftentimes conflict with long-run planning. The lesson is how Singapore manages to mitigate for much of these problems.