Editorial | National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority a good start

The Government’s concurrence with this newspaper’s call for a legislated special purpose vehicle to undertake the post-Hurricane Melissa reconstruction of western Jamaica is a good start towards the project.

As Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness said, with the scale of the devastation in the parishes of St Elizabeth, Westmoreland, Hanover, St James, St Ann and Trelawny, the cost of the damage has been put at US$8 billion-US$10 billion, or over 40 per cent of GDP. The infrastructure rebuilding, with the resilience to withstand climate shocks, can’t be done, especially with the speed required, on a piecemeal basis, and overseen by a raft of government ministries and agencies. In any event, there just isn’t the capacity solely in the public sector to efficiently undertake a project of this magnitude.

“Our traditional decentralised ministry-by-ministry and agency-by-agency approaches and procurement and public investment rules, while appropriate in normal times, were not designed to meet the scale and speed that will be required to implement an effective post-Melissa recovery in any practical time-frame,” Dr Holness said on Wednesday.

But how well the proposed National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NRRA) delivers will, to a significant extent, depend on the funding it has to do the job; the quality of its leadership; the competence of its technical staff; the transparency with which it goes about its business; and the integrity and independence of its oversight mechanism.

Much of this will depend on the NRRA law the Government takes to Parliament, and the personalities recruited to run the agency. However, even before that happens, there is need for clarity on what appears to be Prime Minister Holness’ intention to chair the NRRA’s public/private sector advisory board of people with “expertise and experience in engineering, finance, planning, procurement, and project management” and having the agency report to the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM).

Indeed, while OPM may provide critical support to the NRRA and be its interface with the rest of the Government, given the demands on his time and the need for the entity to, in reality and perception, operate above the political fray, there are legitimate questions about the wisdom of the prime minister leading its board, beyond the powers of the Cabinet to set its policy.

SPECIAL COMMITTEE

The better option, and The Gleaner’s preference, as we previously suggested, is for Parliament to provide oversight of the agency, via a special committee, to which the NRRA’s chairman, and key technical staff, would report periodically, perhaps quarterly.

The Gleaner endorses the activation of the already-established National Natural Disaster Recovery Fund (NNDRF), through which domestically and globally sourced financing for Jamaica’s recovery and reconstruction will be channelled, including the redemption of the Government’s catastrophe bond, the parametric insurance payout from the Caribbean Catastrophe Reinsurance Facility (CCRF) and early funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). These, combined, will total around US$650 million. Another US$500 million is likely to be available from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) via its Rapid Financing Facility (RFF).

“So, we will start this reconstruction effort with approximately US$1.15 billion in immediately available funds,” the prime minister said.

What Dr Holness did not address, however, was The Gleaner’s special carve-out for education in the reconstruction process, including the establishment of a School and Education Recovery and Resilience Fund (SERRF), as a subset of NNDRF.

WIDELY KNOWN

The historic under-delivery of Jamaica’s education system, with its handful of top-performing schools, and a wide base of middling and mostly poor-performing institutions, is widely known and discussed. After two years of significant learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic and further disruptions caused by Hurricane Beryl last year, the education system has again taken a major blow. Scores of schools in the parishes hit by Hurricane Melissa were either totally destroyed or severely damaged.

Given education’s prime importance to Jamaica’s economic development and social equity, The Gleaner believes that the sector deserves specific and special attention. In a sense, Hurricane Melissa has provided an opportunity for an education reset.

In that regard, a portion of all reconstruction inflows, to the optimum amount required for rebuilding educational facilities and the system’s institutional strengthening, should be earmarked for the SERRF, whose immediate and urgent focus must be the funding of repairs and the construction of temporary facilities to get teachers and students back into learning.

Apart from the resilient reconstruction of physical infrastructure, the SERRF, with the oversight of a National Education Recovery Board, would fund teacher training and curriculum development focusing on climate change, the green technologies and the related skills that will be needed in the new era of extreme weather conditions.