SILENCE can be as revealing as applause lines. Watching President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. deliver his fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) on July 28, I waited for a paragraph on the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao road map — on the postponed parliamentary polls, the unfinished decommissioning of combatants, or the funds still missing for normalization. It never came. The speech lauded new security alliances that promise to make the country “safer” in the West Philippine Sea, yet the local peace process was absent in the content for all the donors, the international community and war victims to hear. For communities in Muslim Mindanao, that omission felt heavier than a brownout. The country is less than three months away from the region’s first homegrown parliamentary elections — a historic milestone that civil society monitors noted SONA skipped entirely. Muslim graduates who marched this March, many of them first generation college alumni, heard no hint of an affirmative action hiring push. Recent data from the Philippine Statistics Authority show that nearly 1 in 4 Muslim youths ages 15 to 24 is neither in employment, education, nor training — a stark reminder that thousands of fresh graduates still struggle to turn diplomas into jobs. Regional ministries try to bridge that gap. In May, more than a hundred unemployed graduates in Sulu joined the Bangsamoro Internship Development Program, earning stipends while gaining work experience. Still, labor force data show Muslim participation remains below the national mean, underscoring deep structural hurdles. Discrimination compounds inertia. An Indigenous peoples (IPs) network swiftly observed that ancestral domain and IP education issues were likewise omitted from the President’s address. A recently enacted affirmative action law for minorities in Mindanao now reserves entry level posts in the regional bureaucracy for qualified indigenous applicants — an ambitious promise that can only be kept if national coffers match local intent. Top peace officials acknowledge there is “no place for complacency” in safeguarding the region’s hard-won gains. National leadership has claimed guerrilla fronts are dismantled and hailed joint peace efforts in the south, yet provided no update on the normalization or political tracks that should follow. With the administration entering the decisive second half of its term, the absence of specifics on the Muslims in Mindanao is more than a rhetorical gap — it is a policy vacuum. A supplemental budget message can still earmark election security funds, student loan forgiveness and youth startup grants. The Muslim people of Mindanao do not ask for lip service; they ask that the architect of a “Bagong Pilipinas” include all of Mindanao in the blueprint.
