By Ling Hui
KUCHING, Dec 6: He may look unapproachable, and even intimidating with his six-foot-tall stature and a stern face, but he is not two-faced.
He is not exactly the ‘Mr Nice Guy’ in the neighbourhood who wears a 24-hour smile, but Wilfred Yap Yau Sin, 56, the candidate of Sarawak United Peoples’ Party (SUPP) for the Kota Sentosa seat in the 12th Sarawak Election has always made it a point to go to the ground to perform public service.
A Kuching boy from Third Mile Batu Kawa, he was educated at St Thomas’ School until he left for the United Kingdom in 1986 to further his tertiary education at Keele University where he graduated with a Joint Honors Degree, majoring in law and politics.
Later, he also took up a master’s in environmental management (development planning) at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak and graduated in 2007.
A lawyer by profession, Yap joined politics in 1991 and has been a staunch member of SUPP ever since.
Before he was entrusted the responsibility as SUPP Kota Sentosa branch chairman, he was the SUPP Youth Central secretary-general. Currently, he also heads the SUPP Public Complaints Bureau (PCB).
His foray into the State election was in 2016 when he stood in Kota Sentosa under the Barisan Nasional (BN)-SUPP flag, against Democratic Action Party (DAP) heavyweight Chong Chieng Jen.
Yap had lost then, and Chong shifted the battleground elsewhere to Padungan, fielding one of his special assistants Michael Kong in Kota Sentosa in his place.
Other than Kong, there will be three other contenders in the constituency namely Tan Kok Chiang from Sarawak People’s Aspiration Party (Aspirasi), Lue Cheng Hiang from Parti Bumi Kenyalang (PBK), and Datuk Dr Lau Pang Heng from Parti Sarawak Bersatu (PSB).
In Kota Sentosa, an urban Chinese seat with a unique mix of housing resettlement schemes and high-end residential estates where land prices are in the millions of ringgit per acre, Yap strives for social justice.
As cliché as it may sound, he believes that only policies based on social justice and would cater to the masses are able to create a fair and just society where not only wealth, but economic, social and political rights and opportunities are also balanced within a larger community. — DayakDaily
