BARMM parliament member named regional health minister

COTABATO CITY — The top official of the Bangsamoro government designated on Monday a popular physician-ophthalmologist in their 80-member parliament as health minister and installed his predecessor as chief of a hospital in Maguindanao del Sur province.

Copies of the May 6, 2024 designation by Chief Minister Ahod Ebrahim of the regional lawmaker Kadil Sinolinding Jr. as health minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao circulated on Facebook, also reported by different broadcast outfits here late Wednesday.

Sinolinding replaced as regional health minister the physician Rizaldy Piang, who was installed by the BARMM leadership as chief of the Buluan District Hospital in Buluan, the capital town of Maguindanao del Sur.

“I’m confident that Member of Parliament Doctor Sinolinding can efficiently manage our Ministry of Health,” Ebrahim said on Thursday.

An eye surgeon trained in India, Sinolinding, who started as municipal health officer of the adjoining Pagalungan and Montawal towns in Maguindanao del Sur in the 1990s, had served as regional secretary of the Department of Health in the now defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

The then 27-year ARMM got replaced by a more administrative and politically empowered BARMM via a plebiscite in 2019 as part of the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro between Malacañang and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Sinolinding, most known in BARMM as “the doctor in the parliament,” and his team of volunteers and benefactors had treated 3,267 poor Muslims, Christians and non-Moro indigenous people with cataract and pterygium in humanitarian outreach missions in different parts of the autonomous region after he was appointed member of the BARMM parliament, along with 79 others, including Ebrahim, by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in August 2022.

He told reporters on Thursday morning that he would do his best to manage well the MoH-BARMM with the help of its officials and rank-and-file employees in Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Lanao del Sur, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi and in the cities of Lamitan, Marawi and in Cotabato, where the 32-hectare Bangsamoro capitol is located.