KORONADAL CITY, Philippines – Relatives, peers, acquaintances, and clients have taken turns in expressing their tributes to the country’s “outstanding” Muslim career official who retired last week from government service at the age of 65.

The retiree, Sani D. Macabalang, obviously held his emotion from shedding tears as speakers sounded off their respective tributes at a thanksgiving ceremony marking his 65th birthday, his retirement from public service, and the transfer of the Region-12 office of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR-12) from General Santos City to this booming capital city of South Cotabato.

Two of his daughters, Sairah and Samera, in between sobs described their father as a “model” government official, who has served with “utmost reliability,” his 23 children and 32 grandchildren, as a full-time worker in Islamic propagation, and as a public servant in straight 45 years.

“An ordinary person would have turned crazy from fulfilling his duties to multitude of families, to hectic local and foreign spiritual development activities, and to his official tasks as technocrat of the government in agriculture and fisheries and point man in the halal industry in the country,” Samerah said of her father’s traits.

Despite his being current legal marriage to four wives, widower to two and divorcee to another, Macabalang has managed to excel in public service as typified in his receipt of various citations including his award as “outstanding career executive officer” in 2006, a BFAR personnel said.

He is so far the only Muslim public servant to have received such award from the government’s career executive service development program (CESDP), they said.

Marfin Tan, president of the Socsargen (South Cotabato-Sarangani-General Santos) Fisheries Industry, averred that Region 12 has achieved “unprecedented” feats in fishery development as a result of Regional Director Macabalang’s “innovative and relentless” management of BFAR.

Dr. Teresita Cambel, president of the Sultan Kudarat State University, said she had known Macabalang’s “persistent yet amiable” advocacy for good governance in various forums.

Macabalang finished his bachelor’s degree in fisheries at the Mindanao State University-Marawi main campus in 1967.

Upon graduation, he taught mathematics in two local colleges for two years before he was appointed provincial fishery coordinator for Lanao del Sur.

He studied as a fellow official in India and finished a graduate study.

He was promoted in 1977 to assistant regional director, a position he held in BFAR for almost two decades due to his reluctance towards political backing in professional growth.

Informed of Macabalang’s competence, erstwhile Agriculture Secretary Edgardo Angara met him in Mindanao and endorsed his appointment as BFAR regional director in Region-1 in 2000 by then President Joseph Estrada.

Impressed of Macabalang’s “amazing” contributions to the rapid growth of the fishery industry in Region-1, the supervising Regional Development Council awarded him various citations and petitioned for the extension of his four-year office tenure in the Ilocos region.

“I was very elated of the petition as an official from Mindanao and a Muslim at that. So, I stayed for six more months but later pulled out of the region discretely to serve my home region. Even during my stay in Mindanao, Region-1 officials kept seeking my recall,” Macabalang said at the thanksgiving ceremony here Saturday.

The ceremony marked Macabalang’s 65th birthday and retirement from public service.

It also jump-started the transfer of the BFAR-12 regional office from General Santos City to a building that his administration has constructed at a cost of over P30 million.