Miguel Montojo is a sitting councilor of Romblon and the first Gen Z official to be regularly elected to the post. He is currently a 4th-year AB Political Economy student at the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) and chairs his municipal council’s Committee on Rules. In July 2026, he was recognized with the Asian Pillar Award for youth leadership and public service.
Between weekly ferry rides from Batangas to Romblon and long nights in session, Montojo has pushed his council toward livestreamed sessions, an official social media presence, and a still-unrealized dream of a Romblon Municipal Youth Parliament. Below, he talks about what it means to hold both a student ID and a councilor’s seat, why he thinks time is the real engine of change, and what he’d tell students who want to follow a similar path.
Wearing two hats: youth and public service
Tanya Rafanan: The Asian Pillar Award recognizes youth leadership and public service. How does your work in Romblon reflect both?
Miguel Montojo: There was already an SK (Sangguniang Kabataan) when I started, so I didn’t want to just occupy one lane meant for young people. I chose to be an all-rounder instead—a councilor, an at-large chairman, wholehearted about public service. That’s how I see youth leadership and public service tying together. We don’t want to misrepresent youth as a demographic that can only handle one kind of responsibility. As the first Gen Z regularly elected councilor, I felt I had to show that I was ready for the job and ready to excel at it.
Tanya: You’re both a UA&P student and an elected official. How have those two roles shaped each other?
Miguel: Paradoxically, they’ve made each other both harder and easier. Harder physically, I have to take the roro (boat) every week just to go home for sessions. There’s no direct flight to Romblon, so it’s a two-hour bus ride to Batangas, three hours at the port, then nine hours by roro. Twenty-eight hours of travel, back and forth, every single week. That leaves me about 5.8 days for everything else.
But it’s made easier by the fact that studying Political Economy isn’t purely theoretical for me—it’s lived experience. When a professor discussed the evolution of roro transport in the country, I wasn’t just learning it; I was living it. Being in public service keeps school from becoming abstract; it’s something I apply instantly, every day. And being a student keeps public service from becoming purely political—it keeps me grounded, reminds me how much I still don’t know, and that’s what keeps me from sitting on any laurels.
What the classroom can’t teach
Tanya: What has public service taught you that you couldn’t have learned in a classroom?
Miguel: This one’s a little controversial depending on where you sit politically. I started out as an activist—a leftist. Public service shifted me toward the center-left. Sixteen-year-old me would never have imagined ending up here.
Being a student, especially in Poleco, pushes you toward idealism, which isn’t bad in itself. Knowing what’s right and pushing for it matters. What moved me toward the center was realizing, through lived experience, that being right isn’t enough. Just because you know what’s right doesn’t mean it’s immediately possible. Youth idealism wants change done yesterday, which is strange, because we’re the ones with the most time.
Public service taught me that a lot of things that ought to be simply cannot be yet because of budget constraints, because of institutional friction. I’ve had to factor in that some staff don’t know how to use Word or Google Docs. Half the population doesn’t know how to use the internet or apps, so pushing for digital governance means accounting for that gap too. Some things, only time can solve.
Time is the greatest catalyst for change, not political will. Political will matters; we need it, but time is what allows political will to actually materialize into something real. If we stay impatient and idealistic without end, we just burn out, and we become the very people we resent—the ones who say “ganyan talaga“ and give up. So patience is what you need.
The catalyst to run
Tanya: You’ve pushed for major changes in the council. What made you decide it was time to act?
Miguel: My catalyst for running in the first place was hearing from staff that a councilor was playing Mobile Legends during a session. That angered me. A councilor’s salary isn’t a secret, and it’s substantial. In Romblon, it’s about 1.08 million pesos a year. To find out someone was gaming through a session, asleep on the job. It’s deeply insulting, especially when we keep saying “kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan.” We rarely see that in action. It’s almost just a slogan. The youth keeps getting set aside for ceremonial roles.
When I decided to run, a lot of people assumed it was because my father—the mayor—told me to. Classic political dynasty assumption. In reality, he didn’t want me to run. His words were something like, “Wag muna, hindi ka pa nga tapos mag-college.” I told him, “Pa, your councilors suck. They’re overpaid to do nothing. Pumasok, umupo, makinig, pumirma, umalis, and then sahod na.” That position should be making change, and instead we’re spending a million pesos a year on very little.
Accountability as a discipline
Tanya: In one of your public speeches, you said, “Wala nang mauupo lang, wala nang magpapahinga sa konsehong ito.“ What does accountability look like to you in local politics?
Miguel: The full quote is actually, “Wala nang mauupo lang, wala nang magpapahinga sa konsehong ito, muling may nakikinabang.” No more MLBB during session. I wanted to show, not in a mayabang way, that things could be different. That’s also why I ran for the chairmanship of the Committee on Rules. I wanted rules that ensure we’re functioning at maximum capacity. I wanted to be remembered as someone who institutionalized transparency and accountability, not just talked about them.
It’s easy to say “transparency and accountability.” It’s much harder once you’re actually in the seat. I didn’t want to be “all talk and no action,” so the first thing I did was establish an online presence. It might be uncomfortable to admit, but social media is now the dominant channel for public information; more people will see something online than at the palengke. There was no livestream, no Facebook page before, so I started with myself.
The next step was pushing the whole council—the Sangguniang Bayan—to have its own Facebook page, so ordinances and resolutions come from an official source. Five months into office, I pushed for livestreaming every session. We already had the budget and equipment, and the staff wanted it too. The only resistance came from my colleagues. It took four months to convince them, mostly out of fear of getting bashed online.
But no matter how good an initiative is, someone will complain. The sentiment of the few isn’t the sentiment of the many. And there’s an easy fix if the comments get out of hand: turn them off, and let people share the post instead. That still creates engagement without the noise.
A youth parliament, still a dream in progress
Tanya: Tell us about your initiative, the Romblon Municipal Youth Parliament. What do you hope it can change about how young people participate in politics?
Miguel: To be transparent, the Youth Parliament hasn’t been instituted yet—it’s still a plan. Last year, I passed a resolution, unanimously approved, urging the finance committee and the executive branch to increase the Local Youth Development Council’s budget from 100,000 to 2 million pesos. I expected resistance, and there was. No increase happened at all. That extra 1.9 million would have gone a long way, especially now, toward what the Youth Parliament is meant to do.
I want to lead by example and show that the youth is ready to take on responsibility. Right now there are very few Gen Z SK officials. You can’t really learn governance through pure theory. I want young people to experience it firsthand. It’s tiring how the youth is always ceremonial—listening to talks, campaigning for candidates—but sidelined when it comes to actual governance. I want to move youth from the sidelines to the center: a youth parliament first, then a junior mayor, junior vice mayor, junior councilors, even junior accountants and treasurers, so they actually experience what running a government involves. I don’t want to do it half-heartedly. It’s a dream we haven’t given up on. This year, it was approved by the council but didn’t move forward with the executive; I’ll try again.
A message to future public servants
Tanya: What would you say to students who want to become public servants or advocates someday?
Miguel: First, congratulations, you’re already on the right path toward social change. Even if you eventually lose, even if there are dreams you can’t pursue, and even if you never become a public servant yourself, you’re still doing society a huge favor by being a good citizen. Good governance is easy to talk about and much harder to practice, and it’s impossible without good citizenship to match it. We’ll never achieve good governance without first building good citizenship.
Please don’t burn out, and please have patience. Change isn’t a new idea; every generation before us wanted good governance too. We haven’t achieved it yet, not because no one aspired to it, but because idealists tend to sizzle out. We wanted change yesterday, but we have so much time. Change doesn’t happen overnight; you don’t build Rome in a day, and we rarely apply that same patience to governance the way we would to something like baking a cake. It’s slow and painful. You’ll get tired, you’ll curse the bobotante, you’ll curse dirty politicians, you’ll lose faith. I hope that losing faith isn’t permanent, that you can sleep it off and wake up with renewed energy to keep trying, and eventually, to succeed.
We should be ready to excel, but we should also be ready to fail. To be let down, to be disappointed, even to be irritated at a world that refuses to change. “You can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped” is one of the biggest reasons people sizzle out. Let’s stop blaming people for staying politically uneducated; there’s always a reason behind it. Otherwise, we risk becoming the very people we’re mad at today, because someday, we will look at the future youth the same way and say, “we tried to change it, pero ganyan talaga ang system.” That’s where political will and time collide. It takes time to nurture political will. It’s a fire that burns brightest at the start and risks dying out the longer it takes.
Keep that fire lit, but in moderation. Overdo it, and you’ll get sick of it and eventually quit. Don’t abandon it, because if you do, you become part of the problem. Let’s be the generation that finally breaks the cycle of wanting change, and wanting it, and wanting it. And this time, actually achieves it. In the end, I just want us to leave the world a little better than we found it.