Bongao: An impending future
I came to Tawi-Tawi for the first time to speak to young science scholars about social responsibility and leadership. I was surprised by how knowledgeable, aware, hopeful, and purposeful the college-level participants from Region 9 were. Asked about their most exemplary leader, the most prominent name their word cloud revealed was Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto. Among the top names was Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City. As a political scientist, that spoke volumes to me.
In the few days I have spent in Bongao, I have found myself reading a remarkable collection of visual and verbal cues about a society standing between what it has been and what it hopes to become. The first cue was the airport. Our Airbus A320-200 plane arrived, but the terminal building was apparently unavailable because of renovation. We walked behind it and waited for the baggage train. When the luggage finally arrived, passengers simply helped themselves. It was an oddly intimate introduction to a province.
Our hotel was a plush seaside resort, beautifully appointed, with excellent beachfront facilities. Other resorts along the coast appeared equally impressive. Here was private investment, confidence, and purchasing power. When we went into town, we saw more of Bongao: the bustling market, inadequate public facilities, poverty, and modest livelihoods—interspersed with conspicuous wealth. I was struck by the contrasting public poverty and private wealth. It was not one Bongao but several Bongaos occupying the same space.
Then came the Jollibee visual. Our tricycle driver proudly pointed to the building under construction. It would be the first Jollibee not merely in Bongao but in the whole province. His pride was infectious. A fast-food outlet may seem an unlikely development indicator, but in a geographically peripheral place, it is a powerful signal. A national chain does not arrive merely because people like fried chicken. It arrives because someone believes there is a viable market, sufficient purchasing power, logistical feasibility, and a future worth investing in.
The market has discovered Bongao. It also says something about aspiration. More enterprises mean the youth will find more employment. A family can experience something previously associated with larger Philippine cities. An entrepreneur can look at the opening day frenzy building and conclude that if Jollibee sees opportunity here, perhaps other opportunities exist too. The arrival of a national brand can be both a commercial event and a psychological one: Bongao is now part of the mainstream.
The Philippine Statistics Authority estimates that 28.8 percent of Bongao’s population was poor in 2023, making it one of the better-performing municipalities in Tawi-Tawi—but still leaving nearly three in 10 below the official poverty threshold. Province-wide poverty incidence was 41.8 percent. Jollibee and the poverty statistic are not contradictory. They describe different dimensions of development. One measures deprivation; the other reveals surging demand, investment, and aspiration.
I noticed another set of cues: election tarpaulins everywhere. Bongao looks optically like any Philippine town preparing for an election—faces, names, colors, and slogans covering walls and roadside spaces. Yet the coming Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao parliamentary election is historically different. This is not simply another local contest. It is a test of a new political institution and of the promise of meaningful Bangsamoro autonomy.
What struck me was the relative quietness. There was little of the frenetic campaigning familiar in Luzon. Life seemed to continue as usual: people working, markets operating, tricycles moving, construction proceeding. Perhaps that quietness reflects uncertainty or political fatigue. But perhaps it also tells us something hopeful: a new platform of politics is becoming part of ordinary life rather than an interruption of it. Elections, at their best, are exercises in collective imagination. They ask people to believe that tomorrow can be different from today.
The market has found Bongao. Private capital has found Bongao. National political institutions are finally asking Bongao to participate in a new regional political order. But the inclusive development journey is daunting. My most sobering discovery was that, among the science scholars gathered for our leadership camp in Bongao, there was not a single scholar from Tawi-Tawi.
Tawi-Tawi looks like a place already moving—unevenly, imperfectly, sometimes contradictorily—toward a future that has not yet arrived. Perhaps the task of leadership is to help make those disparate signs converge: aspiration into opportunity, investment into inclusive prosperity, elections into accountable government, and hope into institutional capacity. The first Jollibee may be only a restaurant. But in Bongao, it looks remarkably like a promise.
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