An Act Creating the Municipality of Malmar, Appropriating Funds Therefor, and for Other Purposes

This constitutes the Municipality of Malmar in the Special Geographic Areas, out of 7 barangays of Pikit, North Cotabato, with its seat of government at Barangay Gokotan.

The annex is the substance. It lists every constituent barangay with its land area, population and annual income as of 2020, totalling about 115.45 square kilometers, 36,438 residents and roughly ₱39.5 million in combined annual income. The territorial boundary follows the existing barangay lines.

The machinery is identical across all 8. Corporate existence arrives only on ratification by a majority of the votes cast in a plebiscite in the constituent barangays within 60 days of approval, conducted by COMELEC through the Bangsamoro Electoral Office and charged to COMELEC's own appropriations for the year. The first mayor, vice-mayor and 8 Sangguniang Bayan members are appointed by the Chief Minister and hold office until successors are elected at the next general local elections, while incumbent councillors of the mother municipality who live in the new one serve out their terms there. And because a new municipality has no revenue share until the national allotment reaches it, the Bangsamoro Government must provide not less than ₱2,500,000 every month to run it in the meantime.

Section 2 of every bill in this set carries the fact that explains all of them: these barangays petitioned and voted to be included in the Bangsamoro in the 2019 plebiscite. They chose the region, and then spent years inside it while still administratively attached to a municipality outside it — paying taxes to, and receiving services from, a local government in North Cotabato that they had voted to leave. These bills resolve that anomaly by giving the barangays municipalities of their own.

The name did not survive. This bill creates the Municipality of Malmar; what Parliament enacted on 17 August 2023 is BAA 46, the Municipality of Malidegao. The identification is not a guess — the mother municipality, the barangay list and the annexed population total of 36,438 are the same in both, and 36,438 is also the figure the Parliamentary Districts Act later prints for Malidegao. The seat moved as well, from Barangay Gokotan in the filed copy to Barangay Fort Pikit in the act. Both the name and the seat were changed. Malmar became Malidegao, and the seat moved from Barangay Gokotan to Barangay Fort Pikit. The barangays are the same 7 of Pikit and the population is the same 36,438, which is how the 2 documents can be matched despite sharing neither a name nor a seat.

Fort Pikit is worth pausing on as a choice of capital. Pikit and its surroundings were among the most heavily fought-over ground in the Bangsamoro conflict, and the barangay carries the name of the garrison. Seating a new Bangsamoro municipality there, rather than at Gokotan as filed, puts the municipal hall at the site the name commemorates.

This is also the most populous of the 8, at 36,438, and records the highest barangay income after Pahamudin at about ₱39.5 million.

Eight cabinet bills were filed together in December 2022 to constitute the Special Geographic Areas as municipalities — Bills 129 through 136 — and all 8 became law on 17 August 2023 as BAA 41 through 48. Parliament's bills index records that outcome for Bill No. 136 alone. The other 7, this one among them, are still listed as sitting at Second Reading, Committee Stage, three years after they were enacted.

The plebiscite question is the same across the set and cuts the same way. The vote is held only in the barangays being constituted, so the North Cotabato municipality losing them has no say — which is defensible here in a way it is not elsewhere in the registry, because these barangays had already voted in 2019 to leave that province altogether. What the design does not address is the mother municipality's own position: it loses territory, population and revenue by a regional law it cannot vote on, under a national allotment formula nobody in this Parliament controls.