McMillan to ensure fair distribution of relief
FORMER police chief Col Trevor MacMillan was yesterday tagged by the private sector as their man on the board of the Office of National Reconstruction with the brief of ensuring the efficient and fair distribution of relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan.
The ONR was named this week to coordinate Jamaica’s post-hurricane reconstruction and MacMillan is one of four members of its board nominated by the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ).
The other PSOJ nominees are its former president and the head of Citibank in Jamaica, Peter Moses; the CEO of FirstCaribbean Bank here, Raymond Campbell; and Grace, Kennedy and Company executive, Anthony Barnes.
Patterson said yesterday that the other members of the ONR board, to come from the government, the two major political parties, trade unions and NGOs, will be announced after Monday’s weekly meeting of the Cabinet.
However, at a Jamaica House briefing PSOJ president Beverly Lopez, unveiled the name of the private sector members and Patterson disclosed that the government has been advised of MacMillan’s special mandate.
MacMillan, a former army officer who served a turbulent three-year as commissioner of police in the mid-1990s when he tried to push through reforms, has been involved in recent years in transparency issues.
“I welcome his involvement,” Patterson told reporters. “As I mentioned to the PSOJ president, Mr McMillan has great experience in this regard, having worked with us in flood recovery efforts in western Jamaica in 1980 when I was the deputy prime minister responsible to the government for the overall relief effort.”
Patterson’s reference was to heavy, unseasonal rains more than two decades ago that flooded large swathes of western and south western Jamaica, in some cases creating huge, deep lakes that lasted for months.
Hurricane Ivan, which swiped Jamaica a week ago with winds of up to 145 miles an hour and huge storm surges, knocked out utilities, damaged homes and infrastructure and wasted agriculture.
The value of the damage is expected to run to billions of dollar. Patterson established the ONR this week with a mandate to spearhead a speedy rehabilitation and named Danville Walker, the tough, no-nonsense director of elections, as its head. Walker’s appointment is for six months – which he has said should be long enough to get the bulk of the job done.
The ONR will also manage a hurricane relief fund which has been launched internationally, to which Jamaican firms have already committed nearly half a billion dollars.
It was his intention, Walker stressed yesterday, to ensure the ONR was “effective, efficient and transparent in the distribution of resources in a non-partisan manner so as to ensure faith in the entity”.
Patterson was not only confident in Jamaica’s capacity to rebuild, but felt that there may be an opportunity in the disaster.
“I am very satisfied that we have within our grasp the possibility of turning a disaster into something which will mark a monumental advance in our progress as a nation,” he said.
