COTABATO CITY --- Bangsamoro Chief Minister Abdulraof Macacua had entrusted the health and science and technology ministries of the autonomous regional government to his two colleagues in the regional parliament who are both from Basilan province.
Macacua told reporters on Thursday, November 5, that among his appointees, to lead different agencies of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), are the duly-elected regional lawmakers Jay Datumanong Salliman and Hanie Ain Bud.
Macacua, Salliman and Bud and the 77 other members of the now duly-mandated 80-seat BARMM parliament were elected during the September 14 regional elections, the first since the creation of the Bangsamoro region in 2019, replacing then the less empowered 27-year and now defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Bud, who had served as a three-term mayor of Maluso town, is now minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology-BARMM. He was also former manager of the ARMM’s Regional Ports Management Authority before he was elected mayor of Maluso, one of the 11 towns in Basilan, which also has two cities, Lamitan and Isabela.
Salliman, a lawyer and former vice governor of Basilan, was appointed by Macacua as minister of the Ministry of Health-BARMM.
Mayor Roderick Herrera Furigay of Lamitan City in Basilan told reporters on Friday that he and his constituent-community leaders are thankful to Macacua for appointing Salliman and Bud as health and science and technology ministers, respectively.
“We are very confident that the two of them can handle the ministries entrusted to them by Chief Minister Macacua,” Furigay told reporters in Cotabato via Viber message on Friday.
Salliman is son of Basilan Vice Gov. Hadjiman Sabbihi Hataman Salliman and Bai Annie Datumanong-Salliman, a scion of a large noble Maguindanaon clan in Maguindanao del Sur, one of the five provinces in BARMM.
Local executives in Basilan had, via text messages, separately told reporters in the province and in the cities of Zamboanga and Cotabato, where BARMM's regional capitol is located, that they were elated with Macacua's having appointed Bud and Salliman as ministers of two of the several ministries under his office.
The former health minister of BARMM, the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil Monera Sinolinding, Jr, whose tenure under the interim regional government ended on October 30, following the September 14 regional elections in BARMM, said he will support, in a private capacity, Salliman’s management of the MoH-BARMM.
“I wish him all the best. I shall support his being health minister of BARMM to the best I can,” said Sinolinding, an Indian-trained eye surgeon.
Sinolinding, also a former ARMM regional health minister, said all medics and the humanitarian outreach team in the Deseret Surgimed Hospital in Barangay Kayaga in Kabacan, Cotabato, which he managing and whose patients are mostly from the 63 barangays in the Bangsamoro Special Geographic Area in the province, shall also help Salliman push forward the public service activities of MoH-BARMM.