An Act Establishing and Institutionalizing the Salamat Excellence Award for Leadership Program for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, and Allocating for This Purpose the Salamat Excellence Award for Leadership Endowment Fund

This turns an interior ministry awards program into a statute, and gives it a permanent endowment.

One leader in the region is chosen each year, judged across three domains — accountable, participatory and service-oriented leadership — through three levels of assessment. A technical working group screens applications received through provincial focal persons. A Validation Team of some two dozen people, seating two representatives each from civil society, health, women, youth, business, religion, indigenous peoples' affairs and persons with disability, goes to the candidate's area and verifies the claims onsite, interviewing stakeholders and the community. A Selection Committee chaired by the Senior Minister, seating the Grand Mufti of the Darul-Ifta', conducts the final interviews and declares the awardee by secret vote.

The awardee gets a medallion worth ₱500,000. Their LGU or organization gets ₱20 million — restricted, under a long prohibition list, to actual development projects rather than salaries, vehicles, offices or allowances.

Behind it sits a ₱500,000,000 endowment fund, held in trust by the Bangsamoro Treasury Office and invested as far as practicable in Shari'ah-compliant products. Only the profits are withdrawn, and only on the Selection Committee's certification. If nobody qualifies in a given year, no award is made and the money rolls forward.

The ministry already ran the program administratively; Section 24 simply transitions it into the statute. What the act adds is permanence — an endowment means the award survives a lean budget year — and a documented, multi-stage process with named committees and published criteria, in place of a ministry-run search.

The number is the story. ₱500 million is committed here as endowment principal for a program that honors one person a year. Set against the other funds this registry has read, the comparison is stark: the Ancestral Domain Fund, which must pay for delineating, titling, redeeming and compensating a century of dispossessed land across the whole region, opened with ₱200 million. The Transitional Justice Commission got ₱150 million for 7 years' work. The entire Internally Displaced Persons program got ₱50 million. The Labor and Employment Code — 278 sections, a new arbitration board with three sub-regional offices, a wage-setting function and an inspectorate — got ₱30 million.

The fairest reading is that these are not the same kind of money. An endowment's principal is not spent; the annual cost of SEAL is its investment yield plus whatever the treasury can earn, and ₱20.5 million a year is a modest recurring figure. A one-off appropriation, by contrast, is consumed. Judged that way the act is fiscally conservative rather than extravagant — it is buying a permanent program instead of an annual line item, and doing it in a way that survives future budgets. But it also means half a billion pesos of the region's capital is locked into an instrument whose only output is one award a year, at a time when the funds carrying the region's hardest obligations are appropriated in tens of millions and must come back to Parliament each year to be renewed. Both things are true, and the act does not reconcile them.

The design elsewhere is more careful than the headline suggests. The prohibition list in Section 16 is genuinely tight — the ₱20 million cannot become bonuses, uniforms, utilities, vehicles, travel or a renovated office, and must run through the same rules as the 20% development share of the National Tax Allotment. The onsite validation stage, with community interviews, is a real check against a paper competition. And Section 22 imports an unusually adverse canon: every criterion and rule is to be “strictly construed against the leader-nominee”, who bears the burden of showing they qualify. That is the interpretive posture normally reserved for tax exemptions, and in a region where awards and recognitions have historically traveled along political lines, choosing it deliberately says something.

Two loose ends. Section 12 contradicts itself — the prose gives the final interview 40% of the score, the formula printed directly beneath it gives thirty, and only the formula adds to a hundred. That will have to be settled in the implementing rules. And the act nowhere explains whom or what it is named after, which for a statute establishing “the highest leadership award” in the region is a conspicuous silence.