BARMM parliament members elects new speaker

COTABATO CITY—Members of the 80-seat Bangsamoro Parliament elected a new speaker during a session on Tuesday, October 21, to replace the late 85-year-old Maranao lawyer Pangalian Balindong, who passed away earlier this month.

Members and the figurehead of the parliament, Chief Minister Abdulrauf Macacua, confirmed on Wednesday, October 22, that Mohammad Yacob, who had studied Sharia jurisprudence at the International Islamic University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, was nominated speaker and voted for unanimously on Tuesday by regional lawmakers.  

Macacua and Yacob are both senior officials of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The MILF's two agreements with the national government, the 2012 Framework Agreement on Bangsamoro and the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro, paved the way for the establishment of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) in 2019, replacing the less empowered Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), which had been in place for 27 years.

On Wednesday, Bangsamoro parliament members, including lawyer Sittie Fahanie Uy-Oyod, engineer Baintan Adil-Ampatuan and physician-ophthalmologist Kadil Sinolinding Jr., separately said that they will cooperate with Yacob’s peace and development agenda as speaker. 

“We shall extend to him the same support we extended to our first ever, pioneer speaker, who passed away early this month," said Sinolinding, who is also functioning as BARMM’s health minister in a concurrent capacity.

 The Moro National Liberation Front, which has representatives in the BARMM parliament and is helping MILF officials manage some of the agencies under the Bangsamoro government, also pledged support for the speakership of Yacob.

“We shall help him and our chief minister keep the regional government's peace and development efforts in the autonomous region going," BARMM’s labor and employment minister, Muslimin Sema, chairman of the MNLF’s central committee, said.

In an initial message at the parliament on Tuesday, Yacob said he would do his best to nurture the gains of the peace overtures of the national government with the MNLF and the MILF.

Both fronts are cooperating in overseeing the Bangsamoro regional government.

“We shall continue with the peace and development initiatives started by our departed speaker via our newly anointed Speaker Yacob. We know he will function as a speaker religiously, in the context of good, upright governance. He is qualified for that task,” Macacua said.

Aside from studying Sharia law in Saudi Arabia, Yacob also completed a master’s degree in public administration at Cotabato City State University.