Incumbent Zamboanga City 2nd District Representative Manuel Jose “Mannix” Dalipe and his brother Councilor John Dalipe filed their respective certificates of candidacies (COCs) here Friday, October 8.

The 48-year-old congressman Mannix, seeking reelection after serving his second term in office, will run under the banner of Lakas-CMD.

The 37-year-old John is running for the city’s top post that would be vacated by Mayor Maria Isabelle Climaco next year.

Their father Manuel was a former Zamboanga City mayor who served as a helicopter pilot of the deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos before entering politics.

Mannix’s reelection bid is being challenged by Councilor Juan Elago, a 61-year-old lawyer who has served as a Zamboanga councilor from 2007 to 2010, and again since 2013.

Elago is running under the coalition led by Zamboanga Mayor Maria Isabelle Climaco who is running for Congress in the city’s 1st District.

A third candidate for the city’s congressional post in the city’s 2nd District is Councilor Jerry Perez, the president of the local Liga ng mga Barangay.

Perez filed his COC on Friday, October 1, under the Team Colorao coalition led by mayoral candidate Celso Lobregat.

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Challenging John for the mayorship are Celso Lobregat, Rommel Agan, and Cesar Jimenez.

Mannix has served as a city councilor from 1998 to 2007, vice mayor from 2007 to 2010, and as a congressman since 2016, while John is serving his first term as a councilor of Zamboanga’s 2nd District.

John filed his COC under the banner of People’s Reform Party.

A nurse by profession, John showed his inclination for politics as a student leader when he was still studying at the Western Mindanao State University.

Before becoming a councilor in 2019, he served as Sangguniang Kabataan chairman and later as barangay chairman of Tetuan. – Rappler.com

Frencie Carreon is a Mindanao-based journalist and an awardee of the Aries Rufo Journalism Fellowship.

In an earlier version of this story, we reported that Mannix was running under the banner of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, and that John was running under the Lakas-CMD banner. They have been nominated by Lakas and the People’s Reform Party, respectively.