An Act Providing for the Bangsamoro Civil Service Code

This is the region's civil service code — 311 articles covering how the Bangsamoro Government hires, promotes, disciplines and separates its people, applying to the ministries, the component LGUs, the state universities and the chartered corporations.

Most of it deliberately mirrors national practice, and Article 2 says so outright: where the Code conflicts with the Constitution or national civil service law, the national rules prevail. What sits on top of that framework is what makes it a Bangsamoro code.

Working hours are the most visible example. The standard 8-to-5 day is written in, and then qualified: on Fridays, office hours for Muslim employees may run 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 to 6:00 p.m., leaving the middle of the day clear for congregational prayer. During Ramadan, employees may work 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with no noon break, and the Code states plainly that the 2-hour difference is not counted as undertime. Employees may also elect to work Sundays and take Friday off instead.

Other openings run the same way. Passing the Shari'ah Bar is a civil service eligibility. Degrees from foreign institutions, expressly including Islamic ones, can be certified as equivalent. Human resource development may include Islamic values formation. Special civil service examinations are held for indigenous peoples. Bona fide residents get preference in appointment. And the norms of conduct require civil servants not to act contrary to law, “Adat or the Moro or non-Moro indigenous people's customary law”.

Then there is Article 305, buried in the transitory provisions and more consequential than anything around it.

The new government needed its own civil service rules to replace the ARMM's, which Article 310 repeals wholesale. It also needed something the ARMM never had to provide: a lawful route into public employment for the combatants the peace process was decommissioning.

Article 305 is why this Code matters beyond the personnel office. It permits Mujahideen and Mujahidat to be hired as temporary appointees to first-level positions “regardless of the presence of applicants who are civil service eligible”, and allocates up to 30% of the government's entire entry-level plantilla to them. That is the normalization track of the peace agreement expressed as employment law — the point at which decommissioning stops being a security arrangement and becomes a payroll.

The design is careful about its own limits. The route reaches only Salary Grade 9 and below. The appointments are temporary, running 12 months and renewable 3 times, so roughly 4 years to convert into something permanent — and conversion requires actually acquiring eligibility, with the Development Academy of the Bangsamoro directed to build the training that makes that possible. Hiring is confined to “the transition period”, a term the Code leaves undefined. So it is a door, held open for a while, at the bottom of the structure, with a staircase attached and a clock running.

What is striking is who holds the list. “It shall be the responsibility of the Central Committees of the MILF and the MNLF to determine the mujahideen/mujahidat in the roster of their organic members who shall be considered for hiring under this provision.” A government statute delegates to two non-state organizations the power to certify who qualifies for a reserved share of public employment. There is no obvious alternative — nobody else knows who the combatants were — and the peace agreement is built on exactly this kind of recognition. But it is worth stating plainly, because it is the sort of arrangement that reads as unremarkable inside a transition and unusual outside one.

The Friday and Ramadan hours in Article 198 deserve a note of their own, because they do something the national civil service rules have never had reason to do: they change the shape of the working week around religious obligation rather than accommodating it around the edges. The Ramadan clause is the tell — employees work 8:00 fewer hours across the month and the Code declares in terms that this “is not counted as undertime”. That is not a permission to take leave; it is a redefinition of the working day.

One inconsistency across the registry is worth flagging. Article 2 here subordinates the Code to national civil service law in case of conflict. 4 years later, BAA 82's Section 271 asserted the opposite for labour — that the regional Code prevails over the national Labor Code within BARMM. Same government, same devolved-authority question, opposite answers. Nothing in either act explains the difference, and it will matter whenever the two regimes meet.