Every other minister who sat in Singapore's first cabinet is dead.

One is still alive.
He's 97 years old.
His name is Ong Pang Boon.

You've almost certainly never heard of him.
I know I didn't prior to writing this. =X

He was the PAP's first full-time employee, the man who came up with the idea that Singaporean students should take a loyalty pledge, an idea later developed into the National Pledge.

He produced its final Chinese version.

He laid the foundation for the bilingual education policy that every child in Singapore lives with today. He dismantled the gambling dens, prostitution rings, and secret societies that ran Singapore's streets in 1959.

And Lee Kuan Yew wrote in his memoirs that without Ong Pang Boon, he would have been "a deaf and dumb secretary-general."

That's who nobody remembers.

Ong Pang Boon was born on March 28, 1929, in Kuala Lumpur.

He attended Methodist Boys' School in KL, then came to Singapore in 1950 to study geography at the University of Malaya, graduating with honours in 1954.

His political career began as a polling agent for Lee Kuan Yew during the 1955 Legislative Assembly election.

After the election, Ong went back to Kuala Lumpur and took a good job that paid $700 a month, a princely sum for a young geography graduate in the 1950s. Lee Kuan Yew wrote to him and offered him a job as the PAP's organising secretary. The pay was $450. Ong took the cut.

PM Lee Hsien Loong later explained why: "He had witnessed the brutality of the Japanese Occupation and the chaos of the post-war years. He firmly believed in the PAP's vision of an independent, multiracial Malaya, and a fair and just society where Malayans of all races would be masters of their own destiny."

He became the PAP's first full-time employee and its first organising secretary.

He built the party's grassroots machinery from nothing, working out of a small office, recruiting branch secretaries, organising rallies, and doing the unglamorous structural work that turned a political idea into an electoral machine.

In December 1957, he was elected City Councillor for Tanjong Pagar and became Singapore's first and only Deputy Mayor.

In 1959, at the age of 30, he won the Telok Ayer seat and was appointed Minister for Home Affairs in Singapore's first self-governing cabinet.

He was 30 years old. He was running internal security for a country that barely existed.

As Home Affairs Minister, Ong launched the anti-yellow culture campaign in June 1959, a nationwide drive to shut down pinball saloons, jukebox joints, gambling dens, prostitution rings, and striptease shows.

He reorganised the police force and cracked down on secret societies with new legislation that imposed heavier penalties for gang offences. He spearheaded the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1960, which laid the foundations for Singapore's reputation as one of the least corrupt countries in the world.

In 1963, he moved to the Ministry of Education.

This was the most dangerous portfolio in the cabinet.
Chinese-language education was intensely political.

The Chinese-educated community saw any shift toward English as an attack on their identity. Communist sympathisers had deep roots in the Chinese schools.

And Ong, uniquely among the PAP's English-educated leadership, could speak their language, literally fluent in Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese.

PM Lee Hsien Loong later said: "He played a crucial role, bridging the non-communist PAP leaders, who were mostly English-educated, with the Chinese-speaking masses."

In 1968, Ong made the second language compulsory in the Cambridge School Certificate examination.

It was the single most consequential education decision in Singapore's history.

Every Singaporean today who speaks both English and a mother tongue lives inside the system that Ong Pang Boon built. "But for the fact that he himself was effectively bilingual and well-respected by the Chinese-speaking community," PM Lee said, "this move would have faced much greater resistance."

On August 9, 1965, Ong was one of ten ministers who signed the Independence of Singapore Agreement.

he news devastated him.
He was born in Malaya, his family was still there, and signing that document meant he was severing the country of his birth from the country he'd spent a decade building.

He signed it anyway, and he never looked back.

From 1971 to 1981, he served as Minister for Labour, navigating the transition from labour-intensive manufacturing to higher-value industries.

From 1981 to 1985, he served as Minister for the Environment. He stepped down from the cabinet in 1985 and remained a backbencher until his retirement from politics in 1988.

At a PAP dinner in 1980, as the old guard was being replaced by the second generation, Ong spoke publicly about the transition. He cautioned the younger leaders not to forget the pioneers.

"Leadership renewal was necessary," he said, "but the old guard still had a role to play."

His wife was Chan Choy Siong, a hawker's daughter from Chinatown.

She attended Nanyang Girls' High School but couldn't finish because of money. She joined the PAP at 23, was co-opted onto the Central Executive Committee in 1957, won the Delta constituency in 1959, co-founded the PAP Women's League, and was instrumental in passing the Women's Charter of 1961, the law that abolished legal polygamy and established equal rights for women in Singapore.

She was killed in a car accident on February 11, 1981.
She was 49 years old.
Ong was left with three children.

Her niece, Cheryl Chan, later became a Member of Parliament.

At Ong's 90th birthday celebration at Parliament House in 2019, PM Lee revealed the National Pledge detail that most Singaporeans have never heard.

It was Ong who first proposed that students take a loyalty pledge to build national consciousness.
That idea became the National Pledge.
Ong produced its final Chinese translation.

Every morning, millions of Singaporean schoolchildren stand up and recite words that exist because of a man whose name they will never learn in class.

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Here's what I think of Ong Pang Boon.

Lee Kuan Yew said he'd have been deaf and dumb without him.

The bilingual policy that defines Singapore's education system exists because Ong was trusted by both sides.

The National Pledge exists because he thought students needed one. The anti-corruption framework exists because he built it, and the Women's Charter exists because his wife fought for it.

And when they asked him, at 90, how he saw his own life, he quoted a Chinese saying: "It is the environment that shapes the man."

Then he said: "It has been my good fortune to be at the right place at the right time."

The last man standing from Singapore's founding cabinet.
Still here.
Still unremembered.