Manila Bulletin

Maranaos welcome new MinDA head who reasserts rights over Lake Lanao

- By ALI G. MACABALANG

MARAWI CITY — The Maranao community has lauded President Duterte’s appointmen­t of a Muslim leader as new head of the Mindanao Developmen­t Authority (MinDA), even as it reasserted rights over the management of Lake Lanao in a campaign earlier opposed by the past MinDA leadership.

From their respective places of callings in the country and abroad, Maranaos – known otherwise as “people of the lake” – expressed in works of praises through the social media networks for the President’s naming of fellow Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) founding leader Abul Khayr Alonto as new MinDA chairman.

Manila Bulletin sources said Alonto’s appointmen­t was signed by the President last month but was announced just this week because a cabinet official tried to oppose it with intention to hold the MinDA leadership on “concurrent” capacity.

Among the well-wishers are Maranao profession­als campaign for the creation of a Bangsamoro autonomous entity or a Moro federal state that would correct the absolute control of the management of Lake Lake, the largest fresh water body in the country, which produces majority of Mindanao’s hydroelect­ricity supply.

Since 1950s, the central government through the National Power Corporatio­n (NPC) has been exploiting the lake for hydroelect­ricity, with “less care” about its implicatio­n to socio-cultural and religious well-beings of Maranaos, whose collective identity is directly associated with the lake.

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