An Act Providing for the Bangsamoro Local Governance Code

This replaces the ARMM's local government code with the region's own, running to 605 sections across 4 Books and governing every province, city, municipality and barangay in the BARMM.

The structural commitment is devolution: ministries must gradually transfer basic services and facilities to LGUs within 5 years, supervised by a Devolution Committee chaired by the Senior Minister, which had 6 months to assess whether LGUs could actually carry them and 3 months more to produce a plan. Marawi City, Cotabato City and Basilan keep the full devolution status they already held.

On accountability, the Code does several things the national Local Government Code does not. Newly elected officials must complete 8 hours of onboarding and a 32-hour continuing program that includes conflict-sensitivity and peacebuilding, with disqualification from the next election for those who deliberately skip it. Sanggunian members must disclose in writing any relationship within the 4th civil degree with anyone affected by a measure, before they take part in the debate. Sessions may be conducted in a local language. The interior ministry must maintain a Bangsamoro Register of Ordinances that is digital, online and public. A local treasurer who fails to publish monthly collections and disbursements faces a fine of ₱40,000 to ₱1,200,000, suspension or up to a year in prison.

And then Section 45(g), which is the provision everything else in this Code will be remembered alongside: anyone related within the 2nd civil degree to an incumbent local official running for office — parents, children, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, and spouses — is disqualified from running in the same election in that same province, city, municipality or barangay. Every candidate must swear in their certificate of candidacy that no such relationship exists.

The region had inherited the ARMM's 1990s code and needed one built for a parliamentary regional government with 15 ministries and a devolution timetable. The accountability provisions answer a more specific problem, one the Code's own transitory section is candid about: local office in this region has tended to stay in a small number of families.

Section 45(g) is the most ambitious thing this Code attempts, and Section 595 is the sentence that determines what it will actually mean. The Philippines has had an anti-dynasty clause in its Constitution since 1987 and no enabling law in the four decades since; Congress has never passed one. A regional legislature enacting one for its own local offices is genuinely without precedent in the country. And then the transitory provision defers it — along with the training disqualification — to the May 2028 elections, 5 years after the Code took effect and a full local election cycle away.

There are defensible reasons to phase in a rule that reshapes who may stand for office: candidates and families need notice, and the electoral machinery needs time to administer a relationship test. But the effect is that the officials who passed the Code did not have to run under it, and the 2025 local elections proceeded on the old rules. Whether the provision survives to 2028 is a live question — Section 586 says the Code may only be amended after the mandatory review, but that review falls 10 years after enactment, in 2033, which either entrenches Section 45(g) against early repeal or will simply be worked around.

The scope is also worth reading carefully rather than from the headline. The bar reaches the 2nd civil degree — parents, children, siblings, spouses — and only relatives of an *incumbent running in the same election*, in the *same* LGU. A family can still hold the governorship and a mayoralty in different municipalities. A relative can run once the incumbent steps back. Cousins, nephews and in-laws beyond the second degree are untouched. Paragraphs (h) and (i) close two adjacent doors — an incumbent cannot decamp to run in a neighbouring LGU, and a chief executive cannot step down to the next office below — which suggests the drafters were thinking about the actual manoeuvres, not just the principle.

What the Code does immediately, and without deferral, is smaller but real: disclosure of conflicts before a sanggunian member debates a measure; a digital public register of ordinances; criminal liability for a treasurer who stops publishing the monthly numbers; sessions in a local language with minutes translated; insurance for the barangay tanod. Those are the provisions a resident might actually use next week, and they arrived in 2023.

One quiet asymmetry runs through the whole Code, as it does through the Administrative Code. Section 33 governs local chief executives' supervision over the police, fire and jail personnel in their jurisdiction by referring the question entirely to “applicable national law and the BOL”. The region wrote 605 sections about local government and left the one about who controls the police at a cross-reference.