PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 4 March) — Most risk assessments of the Bangsamoro peace process share a common architecture. They track Manila’s political will. They monitor the BTA’s institutional development. They flag fiscal autonomy gaps, election delays, and the decommissioning standoff. These are real concerns, and analysts are right to track them.

But the risk that rarely appears in these frameworks may prove the most consequential: the MILF is in the middle of a generational leadership transition, and there are no visible second-liners waiting to take over.

This is not a question about one man. Al Haj Murad Ebrahim has chaired the MILF since 2003, and he carried the organization through more than two decades of negotiation and transition. But Mohagher Iqbal, the MILF’s chief peace negotiator and First Vice Chairman, is equally a product of the founding generation — one of the few people alive who holds the full institutional memory of what the CAB was designed to do and why. The broader Central Committee, the body that holds the MILF’s highest organizational authority, is composed largely of leaders who came of age in the armed struggle of the 1970s and 1980s. They are not just old. They are the last generation of people whose personal authority is fused with the credibility of the peace process itself.

Across the MILF as an organization, there is no visible second line.

This matters in ways conventional risk frameworks miss. Peace commitments do not transfer automatically when leadership changes. In organizations where authority is built on personal relationships, battlefield credibility, and decades of accumulated trust, agreements made by specific leaders are fragile when those leaders are gone. The question is not whether the MILF’s formal commitment to the CAB and BOL will survive the transition. The question is whether anyone in the next tier of leadership has both the organizational authority and the depth of investment in the peace framework to hold the line when that commitment becomes costly.

We have already seen the first fissures. When President Marcos appointed Abdulraof Macacua as BARMM Chief Minister in March 2025, replacing Murad, Iqbal publicly criticized the decision of the Philippine Government. That moment revealed something important: even within the MILF, the question of who speaks for the organization’s interests in the peace process is not settled. Macacua is not a mere MILF member, he is Chief of Staff of the BIAF, and perceived as closer to Malacañang than others in the MILF Central Committee. The gap between the MILF as an organization and the BARMM government — which had been largely contained by Murad’s dual role — began to widen the moment a different kind of MILF figure occupied the Interim Chief Minister’s office.

Add to this the decommissioning suspension in July 2025. The Central Committee made that decision, and it is a decision that only the current generation of leaders — with their authority over the BIAF command structure and their credibility with base commanders — could credibly make and enforce. A future Central Committee, composed of leaders who did not negotiate the CAB, who did not personally carry the weight of the transition, and who may have different calculations about what the peace process offers them organizationally, may make very different decisions under similar pressures. The suspension shows that the Central Committee can still act as a coherent bloc. It does not tell us whether a successor Central Committee will have the same coherence, or the same investment in the framework it inherits.

External partners have not built this into their risk frameworks. When I review political economy analyses and risk assessments produced by donors and development banks working on BARMM, I consistently find detailed attention to Manila politics and BTA governance capacity. A structured assessment of MILF organizational succession — who is in the pipeline, how the next generation of Central Committee leaders is being formed, what their relationship is to the peace commitments their predecessors made — is largely absent.

This is a real gap. For the diplomatic community and bilateral donors, succession scenarios should be built into risk matrices now: identify who the plausible successors to Murad and Iqbal are, what coalitions they represent inside the MILF, and how their relationship to the peace architecture compares to the current leadership’s. For those with existing advisory relationships with the MILF — including the International Monitoring Team, the International Contact Group and bilateral diplomatic missions — succession planning should be raised through trusted channels, directly, not treated as too sensitive to name. For development partners programming in the normalization space, like the World Bank and European Union, MILF institutional development should be treated as a peace architecture investment: strengthening the MILF’s capacity to make and keep commitments across leadership transitions is not peripheral to peace consolidation. It is central to it.

The generation of leaders who built the Bangsamoro peace was extraordinary — not because of what they negotiated on paper, but because of what they were willing to carry personally over decades. That investment cannot be inherited. It can only be cultivated deliberately in the next generation, in advance, before the transition is upon us.

The MILF’s founding generation will not lead forever. Whether the peace process they built outlasts them depends on whether anyone is preparing for that succession now, while there is still time to shape it.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Camilo “Bong” Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines.)