KINGSTON, Jamaica — Government Senator Keith Duncan has pushed back strongly at talk that too much power is being concentrated in the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA), or that it will likely displace existing agencies and established processes in ways that are constitutionally or institutionally problematic.

Duncan declared his full support for the authority that has been established by the Government to take charge of the major reconstruction projects in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa that left an estimated US$12.2 billion in physical damage and economic loss.

He was speaking in the Senate on Friday during the debate on the NaRRA Bill that was eventually passed, paving the way for the coming into being of the authority.

“I want to address this concern directly, because I think it rests on a misunderstanding of what centralisation means in the context of disaster reconstruction — and I also think it conflates two very different things: the centralisation of coordination and the centralisation of power.

“NaRRA is not a superseding authority. It does not absorb the functions of line ministries, existing statutory bodies, or local government,” said Duncan.

“What it does, and what it must do, is serve as the single point of national coordination across all of those entities. It eliminates fragmentation. It eliminates inter-agency delay. It eliminates the situation familiar to every Jamaican who has ever watched a government project move from conception to groundbreaking, where a proposal that has Cabinet approval still sits on seven different desks awaiting seven different sign-offs from seven different agencies operating on seven different timelines with seven different institutional priorities,” he added.

Duncan told the Parliament that he has been in the private sector all of his professional life, “and I can tell you without qualification that many serious investment proposals do not get executed in Jamaica due to the bureaucratic nightmare. That is the problem this bill solves”.

He pointed to the Facilitated Acceleration of Strategic Transformation (FAST Jamaica) framework announced by Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness in the Budget Debate in March, which will act as the complementary arm of NaRRA to accelerate major investment projects and economic growth. He described it as “a legislative commitment that an investor will receive a clear approval or a rejection, not silence, and not being passed around from one agency to another, and not an invitation to come back in six months when the relevant committee has reconvened”.

“I ask those who argue for less centralisation: when did decentralised, fragmented, multi-agency approaches to major national programmes deliver results at scale and in a timely manner in Jamaica?”

“We do not have the luxury of repeating that story with US$12.2 billion in physical and economic damage sitting in front of us,” Duncan answered.

The government senator argued that centralisation is the modality which is consistent across successful examples of reconstruction.

He named New Zealand, in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 earthquake and the Nepal National Reconstruction Authority of 2015 and the Japan National Reconstruction Agency of 2011, as examples.

According to Duncan, large reconstruction efforts require coordination that decentralised structures are institutionally incapable of providing. He also highlighted that FAST Jamaica is a legally-enabled, expeditious pathway for private investment projects above a threshold of US$15 million across 12 designated priority sectors.

“This policy decision of setting the threshold at US$15m is of fundamental importance to what FAST Jamaica can achieve as it opens up opportunities for Jamaican private sector companies, for diaspora investors, for regional capital, for consortiums of smaller firms pooling resources to invest in projects,” he said.

He told the Senate that “there are projects sitting in the files of JAMPRO, the Development Bank of Jamaica and on the desks of private sector executives across this country, projects that have been held up not by lack of capital or lack of will but by the bureaucratic maze that this bill is designed to dismantle”.

Duncan also acknowledged a funding gap of US$5.5 billion as only US$6.7 billion has so far been received or committed by multilaterals.

“My hope is that, with NaRRA, the era of proposals sitting on desks for years is finally over and private capital will come to the table and utilise the FAST pillar and close the funding gap of US $5.5 billion,” he said.

— Lynford Simpson