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COTABATO CITY — As a new town hall’s construction nears completion, excitement is growing both within the Poona Bayabao Municipal Government and throughout the community.
The building will house the mayor’s and vice mayor’s offices, as well as the Sangguniang Bayan’s Session Hall and the municipal government’s mandatory departments and offices.
This project is one of the top priorities of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) Government, led by Chief Minister Al-Hajj Murad Ebrahim, and is being carried out by the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government (MILG) through its Local Government Facilities Development (LGFD) Program, which is being funded through Contingency Fund 2020.
According to Minister Atty. Naguib G. Sinarimbo, the project aims to improve the capabilities of constituent local government units in the Bangsamoro region in providing basic services. He added that it has always been the mandate of local governments to serve their respective constituencies and look out for their interests.
Poona Bayabao is a fourth-class municipality in Lanao del Sur that consists of 25 barangays.
The Bangsamoro region, established in 2018 by the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) to implement the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB), is made up of the provinces of Basilan, Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi, the cities of Cotabato, Lamitan, and Marawi, as well as the 63 barangays or villages dubbed Special Geographic Area (SGA) that voted “yes” in a plebiscite in February 2019 to be under the BARMM jurisdiction.
According to the Philippine Atlas has 4,404,288 people. It has 116 municipalities: Basilan, 11 municipalities; Lanao del Sur, 39; Maguindanao, 36; Sulu, 19; and Tawi-Tawi, 11. Its component cities are Cotabato (the regional center and capital) in Maguindanao; Lamitan in Basilan; and Marawi in Lanao del Sur. (✓)