SINGAPORE – Former PAP MP Ong Ah Heng, who was known as the “Kopitiam MP” for his close rapport with workers, died on May 5. He was 84.
The PAP stalwart was already a grassroots leader in Nee Soon Central when he stood for election there as a PAP candidate in 1997 and wrested the single seat from the Singapore Democratic Party.
The three-term MP served the constituency till 2011 before retiring from politics.
Mr Ong, who joined the People’s Action Party in 1964, acted as election agent to founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in the 1976, 1980, 1988 and 1991 general elections. In 2015, he helped campaign for the Nee Soon PAP team.
A veteran union leader, Mr Ong joined the labour movement in 1980 and served many years as executive secretary of the National Transport Workers’ Union, before rising within the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) to become assistant secretary-general.
“I owe a lot to the meritocratic system. There are very few countries where you could start as a construction worker and end up with a master’s degree,” he told NTUC News in 1996. “It is right that I repay society by involving myself in community work – in the labour movement and in other grassroots organisations.”
Mr Ong later became a non-executive independent director at ComfortDelGro before retiring from the board in 2020.
