by

Dr the Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP

Prime Minister of Jamaica

at the

Official Opening of the Troy Bridge

on

June 5, 2026

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Today we gather to celebrate the opening of a bridge, but in truth, we are celebrating something much greater than a bridge. We are celebrating reconnection. We are celebrating resilience. We are celebrating the triumph of persistence over delay. For the people of this area, the Troy Bridge is not simply a physical structure, it is part of the history of this community, and part of the story of Jamaica itself.

The original bridge was built in 1869. Pause for a moment and consider what that means. It could mean that your great, great, great grandparent would have walked across that bridge when it was just built, or maybe even helped to build it. This bridge stood before the arrival of motor vehicles in Jamaica so this bridge was built to carry donkey cart but for 152 years, and in the last 60 of those 152 years, it would have carried some heavy-duty trucks. It stood before electricity reached here. It stood through generations of change, connecting families, farmers, merchants, churches, schools, communities right across the parishes of Manchester and Trelawny.

But I want you to consider that this bridge was constructed after a pivotal point in Jamaica’s history. A point which some of you may know about by virtue of the limited exposure you would have to this event in your school curriculum. I’m expecting that the children who are gathered here from Troy Primary and Troy High and forgive me if I don’t remember all the other schools that are here, The Morant Bay Rebellion.

How many people know of the Morant Bay Rebellion?

It is why we celebrate the national heroes, Paul Bogle and George William Gordon. We don’t know, many of us, what really happened there. We know there was a rebellion, over 300 Jamaicans were killed, estates were burned; it was a massive rebellion, but what it did was to spark a renewed interest on how Jamaica was governed by the British colonial power.  After the rebellion, the then governor, Governor Eyre, was recalled, and indeed he was tried in the United Kingdom. A new governor was sent to Jamaica.

In fact, there was a Royal Commission to study why there was the rebellion, and the commission found many things. It’s not my time today to present on what the commission found, but what it did find was that Jamaica was not being properly administered; governance, infrastructure development. And they decided that the parliament at the time would be dissolved because there was a local parliament of local planters and wealthy people and after that parliament was dissolved, Jamaica became a Crown colony, meaning that it was administered directly from the United Kingdom. It didn’t have its local parliament to administer its affairs anymore because it was clear that there was a failure in the local governance of affairs in Jamaica.

And out of that came a massive thrust to reorganize and redevelop Jamaica. Somewhere around 1867 thereabout, they started to restructure Jamaica. Jamaica at that time had 22 parishes, they whittled down the parishes to 14 so that it could be properly administered. I know it in the minds of Jamaicans, it is inconceivable for some that we could have other parishes but during that period of time, for the better service of the people, the administrative and geographic arrangements were important. The new administration of Jamaica, which was coming centrally from the colonial powers in the UK, decided that they would cut from 22 to 14 but they also implemented a massive programme of public works.

Out of that Royal Commission, and the new governor, which was sparked as a result of the Morant Bay rebellion, we had the formation of the Jamaica Constabulary Force. We had a new judicial system put in place and we had the Public Works Department formed, and out of that came massive public works, including the Rio Cobre Canal, which irrigated some 25,000 acres of land, the building of many of the roads that still exist today and bridges including the Troy Bridge, which was started in somewhere about 1868 and completed in 1869.

I want you to settle on that point because fast forward to today, it took us almost five years to build a replacement bridge. The bridge that was first built wasn’t built to carry lorries and heavy-duty trucks and the high volume of traffic, but it lasted for 152 years. It would have seen Hurricane Charley, Hurricane Ivan, all the hurricanes. It was built by virtue of a national thrust directed by the colonial government, and we independent people struggle internally to deliver infrastructure quickly. This speech is not just for you; it is for all Jamaica listening.

This bridge, it is not only for the benefit of Troy and the communities around, this bridge is a lesson to Jamaica. Like much of our infrastructure, people scarcely noticed it when it was working but when Tropical Storm Grace destroyed the bridge in 2021, everyone suddenly understood its value. The closure of this crossing did not simply create great inconvenience, it disrupted lives. Students had to travel long distances to school, farmers incurred higher transportation costs to move their produce to market. And by the way, the idea behind this bridge was to open up what was called the Yam Belt in Trelawny to move the yams through this bridge, through Manchester to carry you into Kingston to get connected to the ports so the infrastructure supported an economic plan.

It is quite unfortunate that somehow successive governments, have not seemed to have the ability to effect infrastructure plans that support economic plans and social development. Think about it. This is an infrastructure, before it was destroyed and replaced, that we relied on for 152 years. The destruction of this bridge reminded us of a simple truth: infrastructure is not merely concrete and steel. Infrastructure is opportunity made real, opportunity materialized, opportunity accessible. Infrastructure is productivity made possible.

Throughout history, the great civilizations of the world understood this principle. The Romans built roads and bridges not as monuments, but as instruments of commerce, administration, and national cohesion. Across every successful nation, transportation networks have reduced distance, expanded opportunity, and created prosperity. Jamaica’s development must follow that same path. The roads, bridges, railways, ports that were built during the 19th and 20th century connected our people to markets, connected communities to each other, and connected the nation to economic opportunity.

The Troy Bridge belongs to that proud tradition, but at this point, the nation should consider that much of our infrastructure that we have today was generated from that era of infrastructure rapid growth planning. That infrastructure is now aged. It has outlived its useful and engineered life. It is very difficult to communicate that thought to the average person coming on the road to get here, which is pothole-filled and bumpy, difficult to manoeuvre, and in sections collapsing. All you want to hear is how are we going to replace that road and why is the road bad without necessarily appreciating the context behind this.

As a member of Parliament, I not just sympathize, I empathize, I understand because there are sometimes when I wish I could complain to somebody too. It is a matter of passing it on to the Prime Minister when the pressure from the citizens reaches you to say, “I’ve brought it to a higher authority to get these roads repaired.” But I want you to bear in mind that we are not going to be able to repair overnight the 20,000 kilometres of roadways that we have, much of which was built over 100 years ago.

The road is not only bad because the contractor didn’t fix it properly, which is oftentimes a reality that we face and cannot be excused. The road isn’t only bad because water intrusion or other weather events. The road is bad because it is old and it was not properly maintained, but even roads that are properly maintained, there is just a time where no matter how much you maintain it, the road has to be totally redone; which is why we have the SPARK Programme.

A lot of people said to us when we were doing the SPARK Programme, “Why not just take the money and patch the road?” That was said even by some of our own MPs because they don’t understand the problem. Every year, Minister Morgan will tell you, he comes to me pleading for more money to do patching and every year we are patching. Sometimes we are patching the patch that we patched. And yes, we have to patch it because of the convenience that you need but you also have to understand that we have to be thinking, how do we now start to replace these aged infrastructure; these old roads that we have, how do we rebuild them and that’s what the SPARK Programme is designed to do. We are literally not just patching and resurfacing, we are rehabilitating.

So, the course is there- thank God we’re not going to have to create new alignments, but we’re going to have to take off the top surface. We’re going to sometime have to go to subsurface. We’re going to have to put in new drains. And as we take off the top surface and the subsurface, sometimes the pipes that are underneath, they are old, we have to change them; that is all about rehabilitation. The SPARK Programme is designed to address this business of aged infrastructure, old infrastructure, to bring them to the modern standards that will give us several generations of roadways that will last.

Today, we are happy for this bridge and it’s not just the restoration of connection, it’s the restoration of dignity. When I saw the first news clips of the kids trying to cross it, some with rope, some wading in the water, I just felt very, very sad about the whole situation, and said, “This is not what Jamaica is about.”  And today we are restoring the dignity of the people around the area who rely on the bridge.

It also restores the confidence of the people because sometimes, as I could have picked it up from the very rousing applause when, I don’t remember who said it, “You must not forget the rural communities.” I think it’s Mikael who said it and endorsed by Minister Morgan claiming his rural heritage, because there are oftentimes rural communities feel forgotten. It’s a loss of dignity, a loss of respect, a loss of confidence and let me assure you, your government does not forget the rural communities. What the government is trying hard to do is to rapidly integrate the rural communities into the nerve centres of economic activities and that means ensuring that you have proper roads to be able to connect, so you can move from here to Kingston, here to Falmouth, here to Montego Bay very quickly. You can choose to live here and choose to work elsewhere. You can move your goods from here to the markets where they will be sold quickly, that’s the idea.

We’re not forgetting rural communities, and the $230 odd million spent here is a symbol that you are top of mind and not forgotten, but many Jamaicans have asked a legitimate question over the years. If everyone agreed that the bridge was needed, why did it take so long? It puzzles me too as your prime minister because the then speaker of the house, who was the member of parliament for one side of the bridge took an unusual privilege in parliament as speaker to raise the concern, and I was about to write her a note to say that this was not usual protocol for speakers to use their chair to raise their constituency matters, but before I could pen the note, the member of parliament for the other side, Mikael Phillips, stood up and raised the issue as well so there was a bipartisan agreement that the Troy Bridge must be fixed.

But there is such a thing as procedure. I have been using the term bureaucracy. The question deserves an honest answer, right? And the answer lies in the systems governments use to ensure that public funds are spent responsibly. Over many decades, countries around the world learnt difficult lessons about poorly planned projects. Bridges were built without proper designs, roads were approved without adequate engineering studies, costs were underestimated, budgets were exceeded, projects were started sometimes even without financing, and taxpayers ultimately paid the price.

To prevent those mistakes, government developed systems of public investment appraisal. These systems require detailed engineering assessments, environmental reviews, economic analyses, procurement plans, fiscal evaluations, and independent approvals. These are not meaningless exercises. They serve an important purpose. They help to ensure that taxpayers receive value for money. They reduce waste. They discourage corruption. They strengthen accountability. They support sound fiscal management. And so as Prime Minister, I would never advocate abandoning these principles. Indeed, Jamaica’s hard-won fiscal stability has been built upon stronger discipline, better planning, and more responsible management of public resources.

But there is another truth we must acknowledge. Every system can become excessively rigid. Every safeguard can become overly burdensome. Every procedure can eventually create its own cost, and those costs are often invisible. When a bridge remains closed for years, there is a cost. When a farmer must travel farther to market, there is a cost. When a student spends additional hours commuting, there is a cost. When a business incurs higher transportation expenses, it costs you. When an ambulance or emergency vehicle faces delay, there could be a cost; it could be your life.

These costs do not always appear on the government’s balance sheet. They are not always visible to the technocrat or bureaucrat who is implementing the procedure. Yet these costs are borne by you every day. It is borne by the children trying to get to school, risking their lives, going down the slope, crossing the river. My challenge is that it is invisible to the people who are saying to the NWA, for example, “Go and do an environmental study, go and do an economic assessment of the bridge.” Everybody agrees the bridge is necessary, but the procedure requires an environmental assessment of the bridge that was here 152 years before anybody think of environmental assessment. The bridge was built to create the economy that is here, built long before, justified its existence. No need to say whether or not this bridge will create economic activity but yet, this project had to go through all of the procedures.

I can’t complain because ultimately it is the government that makes the law, and I want everybody to appreciate that the government can change the law as well. The requirements that is imposed upon the infrastructure projects sometimes cost more than the actual infrastructure construction. It doesn’t make sense. The time it takes to do study on top of study on top of study sometimes take longer than the actual construction work itself. And I tell you, there is a thinking in our country, don’t trust yourself, so double-check everything three, four times over before you do it. And two, if it never takes long, it wasn’t well done. It’s a culture that has embedded itself in our public bureaucracy. It has gone to the point where it appears as Jamaicans, we are afraid of success. We have allowed a certain school of thought to paralyze us.

When the colonial government decided after 1865 that they were going to build this bridge, they said build the bridge and with that, the bridge, the road, the irrigation, all of it was done. We as independent people, we can’t figure out how to build the bridge and still be accountable and transparent at the same time. Our bureaucracy must change.

Sometimes it is less effective at measuring the cost of not building quickly enough. I want you to understand that point. The system we have is quite effective at measuring the cost of building, but it is not effective at measuring the cost of not building quickly enough. It would have cost us at least 30% less if we had built this bridge four years ago. I want you to think on that. This is where reform becomes necessary.

The purpose of a process is to produce a result. Unfortunately, many of our bureaucrats and technocrats and some of our politicians and many in the civil society who criticize the work of government believe that the end of a process is another process and it has no regard for the suffering that you feel. The people who critique the government trying to move fast will never come here and hear your complaints. In fact, have you ever seen any one of them?

When the process itself becomes an obstacle to results, then responsible leaders have an obligation to improve the process. The objective is not to choose between accountability and efficiency. The objective is to achieve both, that is where this government is pushing towards; achieving both accountability and efficiency. The objective is not to weaken safeguards. The objective is to make our safeguards smarter. It would have been a much smarter application of the Public Investment Appraisal System if it was understood. A bridge was there before. The bridge was being used. The bridge supported an economy. No need to go back and do another test, another consultant. That is a smarter way of applying the rules, but when bureaucracies become self-serving, the objective is not to remove scrutiny. The objective is to ensure that scrutiny does not become paralysis.

This bridge teaches us that good governance must mean more than following procedures. Good governance must also mean delivering outcomes. A modern state must be capable of asking the necessary questions without endlessly delaying the necessary answer and this requires us to have a more mature national conversation. But when reforms are proposed to accelerate approvals, some of the same voices object. They demand urgency but resist change. They criticize delay but defend complexity. They speak passionately about process but rarely acknowledge the hardship experienced by the people waiting for benefits. The people of Troy did not need an endless debate. They just simply needed a bridge.

Empathy requires us to reconsider not only the risk of action, but the cost of inaction, and that is why this government is committed to reforming Jamaica’s bureaucracy. We are determined to modernize our public investment and approval system. We are determined to reduce duplication. We are determined to shorten approval timelines. We are determined to create accelerated pathways for critical infrastructure projects where delay imposes significant hardships on citizens because efficiency is not the enemy of accountability. That is why, ladies and gentlemen, we have created the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority, (NaRRA).

NaRRA will seek to structure projects, order them, cut unnecessary bureaucratic red tape, but at the same time gives a high level of accountability, transparency, and ensures the integrity of the processes. NaRRA will not only help us to recover from the hurricane and build resilience, but more importantly, NaRRA will show us that there is a better way to build Jamaica, there is a faster, more efficient way to bring infrastructure development to the people of the country.

This bridge stands as a symbol of resilience, but it also stands as a challenge to us as Jamaicans. You have been fed a diet by our intellectuals, our so-called thinking class, that you can’t trust your government, that everything that is being done, there is something hidden behind it. You have been fed a diet which says your government is incapable. As independent people, we need to shake that off, and we need to support the effectiveness of government. We must support governments that deliver for the people and this government has demonstrated. Not a perfect government, yes, there are problems, but you can rest assured that this government wants to deliver for you quickly and effectively.

I am certain that this bridge will last another 150 years or more, but for me, this is a turning point. We’re not going to allow critical infrastructure to be tied up in procedures and processes that satisfy procedures and processes and don’t deliver. Let Troy be a lesson to Jamaica. This bridge now stands as a symbol of renewal, a symbol of the importance of infrastructure in national development, and perhaps most importantly, a symbol of our determination to build a Jamaica where government works not only carefully, but effectively, not only responsibly, but urgently, not only according to process, but in service of the people.

Today, we reconnect communities. Today, we recommit ourselves to building Jamaica that delivers for every citizen. May God bless the people of Troy. May God bless the people of Trelawny and Manchester. May God continue to bless Jamaica land we love.

by

Dr the Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP

Prime Minister of Jamaica

at the

Handing Over Ceremony for Malvern Housing Development

on

June 4, 2026

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Thank you, Dwyane for your usual mastery of the ceremony.

Let me thank Reverend Father Olando Gayle for your thoughtful prayers.

Let me acknowledge Mr Franklin Witter, the Honourable Minister  of State in the Ministry of Agriculture and Member of Parliament for this fortunate constituency, and he is joined by Member of Parliament Andrew Morris from the adjoining constituency to give some support.

His Worship the Mayor Councillor Richard Solomon, the Mayor of Black River and he is joined by other members of the municipal corporation.

I see Councillor Simpson and Councillor Holness who is my cousin.

And of course, the National Housing Trust, the team that is always faithfully at these ceremonies. Let me acknowledge your Chairman Mr Linval Freeman and your Managing Director Mr Martin Miller.

Other stakeholders and representatives of the private sector

And let me specially acknowledge the beneficiaries, the persons who will be claiming this land as theirs and building on it. I’m so very much happy for you today.

And you would not mind me making special acknowledgement of the Hampton School. I want to commend them on the choice of entertainment of the song. We’ve been to events like these before, and we have seen cultural items presented, and we clap because we want to encourage our children. We see the effort that they made, but in the back of our minds, we wonder whether or not it was appropriate for the event. It met the standards that we all want to maintain, but this time, I can say genuinely from observation, the audience was satisfied that the selection was appropriate and delivered at the highest standard.

I’m pleased to be here in Malvern, St Elizabeth, for the handover of these serviced lots by the National Housing Trust. Today we handover land, but we are also handing over a foundation for families to build, to settle, and to grow on. A serviced lot is more than a plot of land. It gives a family a legacy to call their own. It gives them roads, drainage, electricity, streetlights, and the confidence that their investment is being made on proper ground, in a planned community with the basic infrastructure already in place. When a family begins to build here, they are not building into uncertainty, they are building into order.

For many Jamaicans, owning a home begins with owning land. It begins with a piece of Jamaica that they can call theirs, a place to build slowly. Some will build quickly, but whatever you do, build carefully and always build within your means. I’m surveying the audience to see the reactions of those who will be owning land here. Whatever you do, build within your means.

This is how wealth is built in real life; one lot, one title, one foundation, one family at a time. The Malvern subdivision is located about 15 kilometres southwest of Santa Cruz. It was originally developed by the Jamaica Teacher’s Association, and I see some representatives of the JTA here. I have a very long and strong relationship with the JTA. They are my good friends. This was originally developed by the Jamaica Teachers Association Housing Cooperative Limited and comprised at the time 108 residential lots. After the National Housing Trust assessed the infrastructure, it found that more work was needed to make the development suitable. The Trust then assumed responsibility for completing the infrastructure works, along with the 30 residential lots that remained available at the time.

After further assessment, the NHT reduced the number of serviceable lots from 30 to 27 because three lots had serious flooding concerns. Now, that was a responsible decision. Sometimes we see developments where the developers are well aware that there are concerns with the lots, and they still sell them, but you will not have that happen with the NHT because the NHT is a responsible developer and in an event it will come back to cost them because the NHT can’t run.

The NHT is always there so they have to make wise decisions, and so whilst there would be significant reason to make the three lots available, once we make a proper assessment that these lots will not serve the people who buy them, we’re not going to put them up for sale and so I want to commend the NHT for that. We cannot build housing policy on wishful thinking. We must build on sound assessment, proper engineering, and respect for risk. If land is likely to flood, we must say so. If a lot is unsuitable, we must accept that evidence. Families should never be encouraged to put their life savings into a place that may later be exposed to loss, damage, or distress.

Today’s handover is also a statement about standards. The works completed here include paved roadways with curbs, street names and traffic signs, storm water drainage systems, electrical distribution infrastructure, and streetlights. Martin, there’s no pool, no gym, no jogging trails, we’ll have to talk about that with the new homeowners. Obviously, these days, the recreation areas and jogging trails are becoming almost standard features for housing developments.

The development cost just over $100 million and that investment is visible on the ground beneath our feet. I want to recognize the project team, which would include the Rural Water Supply Limited, which provided pre-contract civil engineering support, Donovan Simpson & Associates Limited, they were the land surveyors, the NHT project management team, the NHT engineering and contract monitoring department, and the contractors who brought this development to completion. The public sees the ceremony, but the team lived through the long road that made this possible. The surveys, the approvals, the procurement, the supervision, the corrective decisions, and the follow through; that work deserves acknowledgement.

Now, to the selected beneficiaries, I offer my congratulations. Of the 27 service lots, one was reserved for special groups under the NHT’s Special Benefits Order, and 26 eligible contributors were selected. Almost 70% of those selected are women. Women in Jamaica frequently carry the daily weight of holding families together, planning for children, managing household costs, sustaining long-term goals even when resources are stretched. Housing gives that discipline somewhere to land. It converts quiet, consistent effort into lasting assets. It is fitting that this scheme reflects that reality in its beneficiary profile.

Now, the income profile of the beneficiaries also tell an important story. Five selectees qualified at 0%, and this is a point that I need to emphasize that the benefit of the NHT comes, yes, from its undertaking to develop land, it comes from the provision of a mortgage, but the more long-lasting effect is it allows persons who qualify to access a mortgage at 0%. That’s a huge subsidy. Five persons of the 26 will have a mortgage 0%. Five qualified at 2% and twelve qualified at 4%, and four qualified at 5%.

The benefit of the NHT, it’s huge when you compare it to commercial mortgage rates. That means that the majority of beneficiaries are receiving support at rates designed to keep the cost of ownership within reach, and that is what the NHT was created to do. It must serve contributors. It must help working Jamaicans move from rent to ownership, from uncertainty to stability, from aspiration to possession, and it must keep doing that, especially in rural Jamaica, in towns, in farming communities, in growing centres, and in places like beautifully cool Malvern.

Most of the selectees are between 41 and 60 years old. I’m looking at the selectees, and I couldn’t tell. They all look very young. Some may have wondered if this day would ever come, some have waited their entire life for this day, but today, your dreams are coming true. Important to note that four of the new landowners are between 19 and 35 and the beneficiaries, the occupants now represent Jamaica. They represent in terms of the livelihoods and professions. They are accounting, administration, clerical workers, teaching obviously, security, health, safety, housekeeping, childcare, and other forms of service. These are people who work, who contribute, and who are now getting their chance to own a piece of Jamaica.

St Elizabeth has long had a strong relationship with the National Housing Trust. Since its inception, the trust has delivered approximately 1,019 housing solutions in this parish across communities such as Elim, Lower Works, Rahime, Santa Cruz, New Market, Glencoe, Bellevue, Phoenix Park, Gays Land, Meadows, Appleton, Leeds, Balaclava, Balaclava Heights, and Brampton Manor, and that record will grow.

The NHT’s current housing plan for St Elizabeth includes six projects, including Malvern to be completed by 2031. Together, they are expected to bring approximately 1,993 housing solutions to the parish, and these include Friendship Oaks 1 with 256 serviced lots, Friendship Oaks 2 with 248 one-bedroom units, 59 two-bedroom units, and 443 serviced lots, the Holland Estate with 540 solutions, Luana with 360, and Kensington with 60. This handover is part of a larger programme of delivery in St Elizabeth.

Housing policy must do more than count units. It must create communities that last. It must support families who want to build steadily. It must give rural parishes a fair share of national investment, and it must connect housing with roads, drainage, water, electricity, safety, and access to services. The NHT has also been upgrading housing schemes. Under their scheme upgrade programme, 109 housing schemes have been identified across the country, and 60 have been rehabilitated so far.

In St Elizabeth, three housing schemes have reached practical completion with expenditure of 83 million Jamaican dollars. Lewisville in New Market received road rehabilitation works. Lower Works and Jerusalem also received road rehabilitation and general rehabilitation works, particularly to their drains. This work matters because communities must never be left to decay after the keys have been handed over. Government must assist in the maintenance, but the citizens, the residents, you who will become new homeowners, sometimes the perspective is, “I’ve paid so much for the house or the land, and once it’s finished, that’s the end of any expenditure on the house.” Nothing lasts forever. Concrete deteriorates as well. The paint will fade and strip. You have to constantly maintain your house in order for it to keep value. I say this again to those of you who will be homeowners here. Your plan must include maintenance of the structure that you build.

As I was driving in, I was very impressed by the community. It’s clear that in its heyday this was one of the top tier areas to live in. You could see the plan for the area, not to mention the lovely vista that you have of the sea, of the plain, and how cool it is, but clearly over time the verges have been left unkept, the fences have fallen down, persons have neglected to maintain their front yards, trees have been allowed to grow and get out of control, and I did pass a garbage collection truck on my way up. It passed me going down, so councillors there seem to be a service here.

I know I’m going to immediately be corrected that it is not adequate, it doesn’t come on time, it doesn’t come frequently. I will accept and appreciate that, but there is a service here, obviously, but it is clear that the level of maintenance of the community space, residents controlling their own waste and managing how it is disposed, it’s not sufficient to move the garbage from your kitchen and throw it on the roadside with no care of whether or not dogs or other animals will come and disturb this garbage and have it strewn and spread all over the place. And then you come out and you drive past it and say, “This is not my problem. This is the NSWMA problem or the parish council problem to come and pick it up.” That mentality must end in Jamaica.

I was expecting a clap of acknowledgement but i understand. I know, and I will never contest, we don’t have enough trucks to collect the garbage. We don’t collect it as frequently as we should. No one disputes that. We’re working towards that. Five years ago, we had 60 trucks. We made an investment to purchase over 100 new trucks, and we’re coming again with another amount so over time, we build it up, but does that mean that when you throw your garbage out, that’s the end of your responsibility?

Have our values as a society deteriorated so that we have become immune to a sense that when we see garbage strewn all around, it has an impact, a negative impact on us to motivate us to the point that we do something about it, or we just leave it there? And that is the concern that as your prime minister I have when we speak about the deterioration and degeneration of our values. Cleanliness and good public sanitation, it’s not just a matter for the government, it is a matter for each citizen. And not just in these communities, all across Jamaica we see waste all over. It didn’t just materialize. Somebody threw it there or someone was careless in how they disposed of it.

As you build your community, because this is now a new community with a new culture that can be rooted from the start, you must make a pact to ensure that your community is clean, that the road leading up to your community is clean. Your action, citizens action, the civic action is good and powerful instead of saying, “Why don’t you come and collect my garbage?” We know, we are working on that but let us properly containerize and properly dispose of our garbage.

We’re going to be building many lovely houses here but the beauty of the house, it is not just at your front door and inside, it’s not just the lovely tiles and bathroom fittings and chandeliers that you will have, it’s how the road looks coming into your property, how your verge looks, how your sidewalk looks and so as we celebrate home ownership here today, let us all commit to a new civic standard of personal responsibility in keeping our space clean, and this new community can have that culture rooted. And so I appeal to you, I implore you to consider that as you look towards your new home.

Let me thank you for your attention so far. I have another hour to go. There is a lot of talk about the NHT and the NHT being deprived of resources by virtue of the government extending legislation to have fiscal support for the budget from the NHT and I will repeat the point that I have made over and over again. The government does not take the funds from the NHT lightly. We understand what the resources are dedicated for, and were it not a situation that required it, the government would not have done it. And it is worth noting that the opposition did it and said the same thing, that the situation required it, and the situation does require it.

However, we must be clear that the funds that have been taken from the NHT have not impaired the NHT in its ability to respond and to deliver benefits for the citizens, and I want to make that absolutely clear. During the recovery process from Hurricane Melissa, the NHT has already processed and distributed over 5,078 home grants, that’s about 1.974 billion Jamaican dollars, each grant about 500,000 Jamaican dollars. One of the things I find very amusing as a politician is that if you could give 95 persons something, they could get a grant or get access to something, the 95 would say nothing, but the five who didn’t get will be louder than the 95 who got and so the impression would always be given that nothing was done.

I’m sure you have not seen one homeowner who has got the grant come out and say, “I have gotten the grant.” You’re not going to hear that, but I’m certain that you have heard people say they haven’t got the grant. The latest one that I have seen is someone saying, “Yes, I got the grant, but by the time they take GCT out of it and I have to pay transportation… I guess it is what it is.

It should be in the public domain that not just what the government has spent, which is almost over $60 billion already. The NHT has spent almost $2 billion on grants. The NHT gave six months moratorium on mortgage for 36,000 mortgagers in the affected areas; that’s huge. They didn’t have to pay a mortgage for six months, and I was just told that the NHT has waived the peril insurance premium that would be attached to the mortgage for the period of the six months. That’s huge again, but you’re not going to hear that. Nobody is going to make a TikTok video saying, “Thank you, NHT,” or “Thank you, Government of Jamaica.” You won’t hear that so that is why we have to have these ceremonies to put the information in the public domain so the public discourse can be balanced.

The NHT provided 213 special loans to persons who wanted to change their zinc roofs to slab roofs, and that was in the amount of 669 million Jamaican dollars; significant. The NHT has processed so far 3,835 insurance claims totalling 7 billion Jamaican dollars in claims. Of course, there is a deductible excess so even though the claim is for 7 billion dollars, there is a part of it that the insured will have to stand, and so you may end up paying somewhere maybe about 6 billion dollars or so in that region. The NHT has paid out of that claim 2.85 billion Jamaican dollars.

Now, they don’t make the payment all at once. The payment is staged, so effectively they have paid out almost half of the insurance claims, and I think this is a point that we should pause at because the NHT is a very good example of an entity acting swiftly. Insurance claims aren’t processed that quickly, but the NHT has done a very good job, and I want to point that out to the country and to challenge the private insurers for which claims have been made on them, and for which I have had many letters and people writing to me to say, “My insurers, they have come, they have assessed, but I can’t hear anything. Nothing has been paid to me yet. I’m still in the negotiation.” I believe that they should pay you very quickly. Paying up the insurance coverage, paying up the insurance is critical to the national recovery, so I want to commend the NHT for being quick in making the insurance payments, and I want to challenge the private insurers to speed up the payments on the claims. That is an important part of the recovery from Hurricane Melissa.

Another contribution of the NHT to the recovery is that NHT has spent over US$29 million to purchase 2,500 semi-permanent modular housing solutions. Yes, 1,200 of these housing solutions are already on the island, 300 will be here by Friday, and the remaining 1000 we expect to be here by July. These units will form the basis of the government’s response for persons who must be relocated from areas that have been significantly damaged or for persons who have lost everything and are not able to rebuild.

The NHT has identified five clusters, five areas in which these units will be deployed, and units that have to be deployed randomly across the island, those will be done through the Ministry of Economic Growth and Infrastructure Development. The NHT is also making a contribution to the building of the bases on which these semi-permanent modular housing solutions will be put. And I want to state it here; there was some concern that the Government of Jamaica did not spend $1.4 billion that was gifted to it.

Now, any accountant, anyone who understands finance will immediately look at that and say, funds are fungible so that shouldn’t be an issue in the public domain, but we make an issue of it. The government may not have used that $1.4 billion, but it spent almost $67 billion on all the things that people needed. We took a decision that the resources that were contributed would be matched with needs that are tangible, visible, traceable, meaningful, and lasting. We make no excuse for that, and that is what distinguishes my administration from administrations of the past. We make wise financial decisions.

Any donor who has contributed to the hurricane relief in Jamaica would be proud to see these homes being erected and the bases being pointed to. It’s quite different from saying, “Well, all of it was used to buy food” or given as a grant where nobody’s going to come up front and say, “I got it.” There is no testimonial. The house that is erected, it is there, it is visible, and it is very important that we do it because there are persons who are vested in trying to paint the administration in some way that the resources that were donated would not be used. Well, there you have it, the resources are accounted for, the resources are there, and you will see what the resources were used for. I thought I would use this opportunity to point that out.

These 2500 units will be deployed heavily, most of it, I think, based upon the needs. A large part of it will be deployed right here in St Elizabeth. Your brothers and sisters who are on the coast in Parottee, an area that was badly damaged which I toured, which is quite clear that the cost of reconstruction there would be quite higher than the houses that you’re trying to save so we have already indicated to the people of Parottee that that area has to be relocated, and we will do it in such a way that their livelihood will be preserved, the value of their asset will be preserved, but most importantly, their dignity will be preserved.

It’s not going to be an overnight process. It will be a process that involves them at every step. They can be assured of what we are doing. And so, the NHT, the UDC, the municipal authority, all of them will be working together and in this relocation, NaRRA will play a critical coordinating role in ensuring that everybody’s working on the same script and everybody’s working quickly to ensure that the people who have been dislocated will get the benefits. Some of these housing units will also go to the shelter in providing housing solutions for those persons who were in the shelter in Petersfield and so again, the NHT ought to be given some credit for supporting that relief effort of those citizens who were in the shelter for this very long time. Bases have already started to be constructed, and the houses will be deployed there. The NHT has also identified some clusters in Westmoreland as well. I believe two clusters, that you will be building houses using this semi-permanent solution.

Finally, the introduction of these housing solutions into Jamaica is going to be carefully studied. We want to see whether or not these solutions can be deployed widely and a financing mechanism can be used for them. I have an inner-city constituency, and I well understand the need for housing. There might be a family of seven, the son grows up, becomes an adult and he wants his own room, he goes and he buys a couple sheet of ply, some two-by-four and some zinc, and he finds a little place, and as we say, he kotch up, and that becomes his home. But multiply this all across Jamaica, and then you begin to see what Jamaica looks like. It’s not aesthetically pleasing, it’s not secure, it’s not resilient, and you can’t really claim to have an asset. But more than that, it can’t be financed. He couldn’t go to a bank and say, “Lend me on this” but if we were to find a building solution that is within the price point of persons who can’t afford some of these other structures, and a financing plan could be put beside it, then we could start to change how Jamaica looks as people begin to seek housing solutions.

We’re going to be studying it very carefully. There are some issues. People have said that when these have been deployed,  it creates trailer parks and all kinds of things, but there are other models where they have worked, and we can ensure here that it works so we will be carrying out not just engineering and architectural studies on it, but we are going to look at the sociology of it. How are people’s lives changed, how are people’s behaviour changed by having access to these kinds of housing? We’re going to study it and then see if it can be rapidly deployed.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have been such a wonderful audience. Thank you for listening to the NHT lecture.

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Allow me to acknowledge your minister, the Honourable Desmond McKenzie, Minister of Local Government and Community Development, and other members of the Cabinet who are here.

Let me specially acknowledge as well the Minister of Finance who is here,

Minister Donovan Williams

Mrs Natalie Neita Garvey, Member of Parliament and Spokesperson on Local Government representing the Leader of the Opposition

Mrs Marsha Henry Martin, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development,

Chairmen of municipal corporations who are here.

I notice the Mayor of Kingston and St Andrew is here, and I also did not see our Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Honourable Alando Terrelonge. Normally I would be used to you at the head table, sir. I was about to mention that you are in bad company.

And Member of Parliament Damion Crawford.

I’m surprised by the very high level of government representation that has turned up today. I’ve been to other events where I scarcely see any government or opposition representation, but it shows you how important you are, and I take that as a very good sign. It’s good to see all of you here.

Mr Omar Sweeney, Chairman of the National Solid Waste Management, and other board members who are here.

Mr Audley Gordon, Executive Director of the National Solid Waste Management Authority,

Awardees and other members of staff of the NSWMA and the MPM

Representatives of the media,

Ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed a good evening.

I am pleased to join you for this Long Service Award ceremony. Today, we honour workers who have given 15, 20, 25, and 30 years, and more, to the service of Jamaica. Some of you have spent most of your adult life in this work. You have worked before sunrise. You have worked in the rain, in the dust, in the heat. You have worked during floods, during hurricanes. You have worked through disasters, through difficult years when resources were short, and the recognition was even shorter. You have worked when the country noticed, and you have worked when the country forgot to notice, but I also want to say clearly your government sees you, your Prime Minister sees you, and today, on behalf of every well-thinking Jamaican, I say thank you.

Public sanitation is among the most essential public service in any country. I want to emphasize that word, essential. It is sometimes used casually, but here it is used precisely because if you stop, everything else stops. The markets cannot operate, and the tourists begin to complain, the hospitals face higher burden, and the country smells of neglect.

Public sanitation protects public health. It protects our children, it protects our schools, our homes, our businesses, our tourism product, but most importantly, our national image. A visitor may come to Jamaica for the beach, the music, the food, or the warmth of the people but they will leave with an impression of our country if your work is not effectively done so the work you do has significant national value. It has economic value, it has health value, but it has human value; it speaks to the dignity of the country. That’s what it comes down to, the dignity of us as a people, and that shows how important your work is.

For those receiving awards for fifteen years of service, you are now among the firm foundation of this organization. You have stayed long enough to know the work like the back of your hand. It is now in your bones, as they would say, a part of you. You have seen the pressure, and you haven’t cracked under the demands. The early mornings and the hard days, you are stronger for it.

For those at twenty years, you have given consistent service across seasons, administrations, disasters, and changes in leadership. Institutions survive because people like you keep turning up. To put it this way, if tomorrow all the people who served twenty years or more decided, “I’m not coming to work,” and I’m not encouraging that, the organization would be crippled, and in fact, it would be very difficult to recover because you represent the experience of the organization.

For those at 25 years, you are the experienced leaders. Whether your title says it or not, younger workers learn how you carry yourself. They learn from you. They watch how you solve problems. That is, they watch how you use experience. They watch how you speak to residents. They watch how you treat the equipment, the team, and the task. You are teaching even without knowing it, and that teaching shapes the organization.

And for those at 30 years and beyond, you are institutional pillars. You helped to build the NSWMA to what we know it as today, and in fact, many of you would have started under MPM. Some of you served before the fleet was what it is now, before the systems are what they are now, before the country had a fuller understanding of how central waste management is essential to national life. Your service built this organization.

Long service also tells us something about character. It takes discipline to remain. It takes sacrifice to serve. It takes loyalty to give decades of your labour to work that is demanding and too often underappreciated. Many of you who have families who have also carried the weight of your service. They have adjusted to your hours. They worried when you worked through storms. They understood when duty called so today, I also salute your families. Their support helped to make your service possible.

And the government’s duty is to respect this sacrifice in practical ways, and that is why we continue to support greater stability in the sector. Permanent employment matters. And just before I came up on stage, I sought an update from your executive director, and I asked him how many workers have now formally been made permanent on the staff of the NSWMA and he says, “Well, you know, the commitment is to ensure that all who qualify are made permanent, but up to today, over two thousand employees have been made permanent” so it’s not just talk it’s substance and it is a genuine show of how much we value and respect you. It gives workers a stronger footing. It gives families more certainty. It keeps experienced people inside the system. It builds the capacity of the institution. A country cannot run essential services on uncertainty. The people who keep Jamaica clean deserve dignity in work, they deserve fair treatment, they deserve the chance to plan their lives, support their children, and retire with pride. We have also been working to improve the tools available to the NSWMA.

Over the years, the government has supported fleet expansion, including new compactor trucks, motorcycles for enforcement officers, and pickup vans for fleet and enforcement operations. And after the recent hurricane recovery demands, ten new tipper trucks were provided in December to strengthen emergency response and cleanup capacity. That investment matters because waste management becomes even more urgent after a disaster. Fallen trees, broken furniture, damaged zinc, spoiled goods, blocked gullies, and bulky waste can quickly become a second emergency after the first emergency has passed. Jamaica learned that after Hurricane Melissa.

Recovery is about roofs, it’s about water, electricity, healthcare, and schools, but it is also how quickly we can clean the community and remove debris because it becomes a health risk, and it also blocks connectivity, traps communities, breeds vectors, and therefore a strong health risk. And therefore, what we learned after Hurricane Melissa is that we have to develop the capacity not just to deal with everyday municipal waste, but to deal with the debris that a massive hurricane can generate and we had to deal with it and deal with it very quickly, and I want to commend the NSWMA for how they have managed to remove the debris. And we saw that in operation in Black River specifically, where the entire town and corridor to Black River was cleaned. Again, commendations to you and your team.

The NSWMA sits right at the intersection of national recovery and the hurricane response. In fact, the NSWMA is a first responder to the disaster. As we enter the hurricane season, preparedness must now guide action. This week, the NSWMA launched Operation CALM. Yes, another acronym but acronyms are important to quickly convey a particular strategy or effort. Yes, we are always launching operations to expedite sanitation efforts or to clean. Almost every year we have a bulky waste removal exercise, and I can tell you, being a member of parliament myself that we do a bulky waste exercise in our constituency maybe three times a year and maybe a week after it was done, it is as if it was never done.

You know that we will clean today. We will send out notices that the truck is coming. Residents will put out their bulky waste. We will go through, we’ll clean up, and you feel good, and yes, we have done the cleaning, and then the very next day, on the same road, someone else will come and they will put out a couch, a TV, or they will call you and say, “MP, why you never send the truck?” That time they know the truck came and all, but the strategy is to turn it around on you and then you say to them, “No, but the truck came.” And they say, “But MP, I didn’t see it. Send it again.” You know it because you are the ones we have to call and say, “Go to this housing scheme,” or “Go to this road.”

The NSWMA has launched Operation Calm, an effort aimed at clearing flood-prone communities of bulky and solid waste, advising residents of their responsibilities, using community leadership networks, and maintaining a visible presence in those communities throughout the season. This is born of the learnings; the experience of Hurricane Melissa so let’s not wait until the flood takes the debris and deposits it in the drains and roadways. Let’s try and clear the debris before the floods come.

An important part of the operation is advising residents of their responsibility, so there will be a significant public education campaign attached to Operation Calm. That is the right approach. Preparedness saves lives. A blocked drain can flood a home; a pile of waste can become a hazard; a community that waits until the rain starts has already lost time. So, I urge citizens to work with the NSWMA to put outside the waste from your home in a proper fashion. And I have noticed in almost all communities across Jamaica, from inner-city communities to upscale communities, that somehow the residents feel that once they have taken the waste pass their gate and they have left it in a container or tied in a bag outside their gate, it is no longer their responsibility. It’s the strangest thing.

You will drive through a community, and you will see the most well-appointed house. The best manicured lawns, the well put together buildings but very little attention paid to securing the waste that they have disposed of. It is left at the mercy of stray animals, of the wind, of persons of unsound mind to take that and to have it strewn all over the streets, plastics are allowed to be thrown everywhere; and then, of course, the view is that the NSWMA will come and clean and collect all of this, because that is the role of the sanitation worker. Yes, it is the role of the sanitation worker to clean the streets, pick up the garbage, but it is your civic duty to ensure that your waste is properly bagged and securely contained where it cannot be disturbed and create a further public nuisance or health nuisance.

Now, I already hear the retort, “It’s not my fault the truck didn’t come,” or “It’s not my fault, I did my part. I put out my waste, but the truck took so long to come that the cat got to it”. There has to be a national conversation about how we treat the public space, particularly in how we dispose of our domestic and municipal waste. Yes, without question, government cannot argue the point that we don’t have trucks enough to cover the entire Jamaica. The trucks don’t come on schedule and on time; we can’t argue that point. We don’t have sanitary landfills. We don’t have enough transfer stations; we can’t argue these points, but it is precisely because we don’t have the resources, it is precisely because the government is short on the resources that citizens have to do much better in how they control, contain, and dispose of their waste. It is not therefore an excuse.

There are laws regarding the duties of citizens to properly dispose of their waste. The fines are very low, and there is rarely any enforcement, but as we move into a new dispensation of orderliness in Jamaica, let me assure you that that will have the attention of the government. The strategy for order has never been fully articulated in the way I’m about to do it now, but the first line of effort in the strategy of order is to bring violent crimes under control, and the ultimate violent crime, which is murder, and that strategy has worked very well.

Today, our murder rate is the lowest it has been in over thirty years and we have been doing that for four years now so it’s not a one-off event. It is a strategy executed almost now for a decade, which is bearing fruit That strategy is then followed up by order in public spaces, and the first line of effort in that strategy is to get order in traffic. And we have passed a new Road Traffic Act, and I know there are many complaints about the enforcement of the police, the adjustments that have been made in the ticketing system, and the courts have been far more active in prosecuting road and traffic incidents and we’re seeing good results. We have improved the ability of the police to issue tickets, and they issue hundreds of thousands of tickets per year.

The next line of effort is to address the disposal of waste in public spaces, particularly travel waste. People in moving about their business, how they dispose of the waste. When you’re finished drinking your favourite juice, do you hold the bottle until you see a receptacle, you dispose it there? Or do you immediately just throw it on the ground or throw it through the window of the car? Is it an excuse that there is no receptacle and therefore you have to throw it down anywhere?

We’re going to be tackling this business of travel waste, and the same system that has been developed for ticketing road traffic offenses is going to be the same system with some modifications that will be used to ticket persons who are improperly disposing of their waste in public spaces. I’ve been at these platforms long enough making these controversial statements long enough to know when they are not immediately understood or accepted because in the back of everyone’s mind is, could I be punished? Could I fall victim to this? Does this mean I could get into a confrontation with a policeman because I threw my bottle on the road?

Unfortunately, yes. But it also means that you could now change your behaviour and keep that bottle with you until you have an appropriate place to dispose of the waste. The society can’t improve unless we all agree to change our behaviour, and it is the last thing for me to want to do to stimulate behaviour change by enforcement of some punitive action. We would much rather stimulate behaviour change by reasoning with you, as I’m doing now, pointing out to you that your behaviour is inimical to your own interest, and that if we agree to change the way in which we behave, the quality of life that we experience would improve.

So, I am not here threatening greater penalties; that’s not what I’m doing. What I’m trying to do is to get you to think about how we can achieve the better Jamaica that we all want. Unfortunately, sometimes when we speak about the better Jamaica, it is as if the better Jamaica is going to happen to you by some miracle and not you creating the better Jamaica by changing your action.

I hope I have stimulated some thoughts on that. These things don’t get covered or carried in the media because they’re not controversial maybe enough or newsworthy enough, but these are the important things that should occupy our news space. These are the things that are far more important to the life that we enjoy, the simple thing. Can you imagine if every child, if every taxi operator, if every motorist, every cyclist, everyone in the market were to decide without any form of enforcement that I am not throwing my plastic bottle on the street, I’m going to wait until I find an appropriate place, how much cleaner Jamaica would look without the expenditure of one additional dollar?

The question is, how do we get this done? It has to be public education, and it has to be a bit of enforcement. And there are those who feel it will never happen until they go to other countries and see that other people do this second nature quite naturally, that other people would feel offended if they saw their friend, their neighbour, their relative do that. They would stand up and say, “Don’t do that”. It tells what has happened to our society, that it has become normalized to throw our waste in the public space. It’s no longer an indignation to us and that is what we have to do when we say we need to change the values of the society because it was not always that way in Jamaica. Bits of paper lying on the ground, pick them up, pick them up; that was the basis of it starting in our schools with our children. Our parents couldn’t see us do that and not say anything but now nobody says anything, so we need to get back to that time when cleanliness was seen as next to godliness.

Clean communities require partnership. No agency, however, no matter how well-led they are, can clean a country by itself. Its citizens are important to any effort to clean the country. Public education is therefore an important part of public sanitation. Behaviour matters, awareness matters, enforcement matters as well, and as I said, the law must have teeth because the careless actions of a few cannot continue to endanger whole communities.

So, to the management of the NSWMA and MPM Waste Management, I thank you for the work you are doing to strengthen the organization, support your teams, and improve service delivery. Expectations are high, the public is often impatient, nevertheless, you must continue to raise the standards.

To the awardees, today belongs to you. You are the backbone of public sanitation and public health in Jamaica. You are among the workers who make ordinary life possible. Your work may begin in the streets, but its effects reach the hospitals, the schools, the hotels, the boardrooms, and our churches.

In fact, your work supports the entire economy. I want every awardee here to leave with a full sense of pride. You chose service. You stayed the course. You helped to keep the country clean, safe, and functional. The government will continue to support the NSWMA and its workers. We will continue to support better systems, better tools, and stronger workforce stability, and we will continue to affirm the dignity of your labour because every honest worker who serves Jamaica deserves respect.

Congratulations and thank you.

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 Thank you, master of ceremony.

Let me thank our hosts, Rear Admiral Cassidy Norman and Commanding Officer Joseph Furco, and other members of the command team of the USS Nimitz.

The Leader of the Opposition,

Members of my Cabinet,

Chargé d’Affaires Scott Renner,

Members of the Diplomatic Corps,

Other specially invited guests,

All friends, this is a good evening.

It is a pleasure to be with you this evening aboard the USS Nimitz here in Kingston Harbour. Indeed, I dare say that this may be the first time that a Jamaican prime minister has stood onboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier docked in Kingston Harbour, but I could easily say I believe it’s the first time a prime minister of Jamaica has stood on a aircraft carrier anywhere. On behalf of the Government and people of Jamaica, I welcome Rear Admiral Norman, Captain Furco, and the men and women of the USS Nimitz to Jamaica.

Every Jamaican knows that Kingston Harbour is the seventh largest natural harbour in the world. Some of us may have doubted whether or not a US aircraft carrier could be docked here in Kingston Harbour. Well, we are the seventh largest natural harbour in the world so yes, we can host the largest ships. It is deep enough to receive the largest vessels afloat and situated at one of the most strategically consequential points in this hemisphere within reach of the Panama Canal, positioned between North and South America, and at the intersection of the major maritime corridors linking Americas to Europe, Asia, and beyond.

Jamaica is, at its core, a maritime nation, even if most of us don’t always think that way, but yes, we are a maritime nation. Every barrel of fuel that powers our economy, every container moving through our ports, every ton of food that supplements what we grow, all of it depends on safe open sea lanes and our ambition is explicitly tied to this harbour and these waters.

Jamaica’s ambition is to become the logistics hub of the Americas, the premier node connecting global supply chains between the continents, a gateway comparable in function to what Singapore, Dubai, and Rotterdam represent in their respective regions. That is not a distant aspiration. It is an active national strategy with infrastructure, legislation, and investment already in motion.

That ambition, however, can only be realized if the maritime space is secure and the same geographic advantages that make Jamaica attractive to commerce also make these corridors attractive to those who would seek to exploit them for other reasons. Transnational criminal networks use these same sea lanes. They move firearms, and it is those firearms that have fueled gang violence that would have cost us so many Jamaican lives. They move narcotics. They probe every gap in maritime surveillance, every seam between jurisdictions. These are not abstract threats. When a weapon is intercepted at sea, it is a weapon that does not reach a community in Kingston or Montego Bay or Spanish Town.

Jamaica has been deliberate and strategic in building the partnership that address these threats. Through our cooperation with the United States Southern Command, the United States Navy, the United States Coast Guard, and other law enforcement partners, we have developed real operational capacity in intelligence sharing, maritime domain awareness, joint interception, and the training of our own forces. This is not security that happens to us, it is security we have worked to shape as sovereign partners with our own analysis, our own interests, and our own judgment.

I want to say something about the nature of that partnership because it matters. Small island states in the Caribbean are sometimes spoken about as if geopolitics is something done to them rather than something they participate in. That has not been Jamaica’s experience, and it is not our posture. We engage with the United States as equal partners with shared interests, maybe not identical interests, but substantially aligned ones. The basis of that relationship is mutual respect, operational trust, and a clear-eyed understanding of both sides of what we each bring to the partnership. That is the foundation on which it operates and the foundation on which it will continue to operate.

The USS Nimitz is here as part of Operation Southern Seas. The presence of this vessel is a signal that the United States takes this hemisphere seriously and takes its partnerships here seriously and our being on this ship here tonight is a clear signal of the value we each place on this partnership.

Maritime partnership means much more than security operations. When Hurricane Melissa struck last October, the capacity to respond quickly, to move supplies, restore communication, and coordinate relief was also a function of a maritime space through which regional and international partners could provide logistical and operational support. And here, I would like to thank the United States for supporting Jamaica’s recovery and humanitarian efforts, particularly with airlift capacity.

As climate risks intensify in the Caribbean, this dimension of our partnership will only grow in importance. A secure well-governed maritime space is the precondition for everything else we are trying to build. To the sailors and officers of the USS Nimitz, the work you do is largely invisible to the people who benefit; that is the nature of effective deterrence. There is no press conference when a threat is quietly neutralized, no headline when the sea lane stays clear; not these days, however, we see it nonetheless, and we are grateful for it.

I’m also told that among the crew of this vessel are many women and men of Jamaican heritage, Americans who carry Jamaica with them in their names, their families, and their stories. To you especially, welcome home. You represent something important about the ties between us, between our two countries, ties that are not only governmental or commercial, but human and familial, running across generations and across the waters. We are proud of you. I hope that all of you, whatever your background, will have the opportunity while you are in Kingston to experience the warmth, the culture, and hospitality that Jamaicans are known for, because Jamaica, like most things worth knowing, is better understood close up.

To Rear Admiral Norman and Captain Furco, thank you for the spirit in which you bring this vessel into our waters. To Charge d’Affaires Renner and the team at the United States Embassy, thank you for the consistent substantive work of keeping this relationship grounded in practice, not just in principle. The relationship between Jamaica and the United States is broad and longstanding, built on shared history, family ties, trade, and the movement of people between our countries across generations. We value it and we intend to keep building on it.

To my Jamaicans here this evening, look around you. The USS Nimitz is the lead ship of its class, one of the largest vessels ever constructed, and to my knowledge has never before docked in Jamaican waters. I cannot say when or whether such an occasion will come again, so let this moment register. Take in the sheer scale of what surrounds us and let yourself feel what it means to have this vessel here as a symbol of friendship and partnership from our longstanding close and critically important neighbour in the region, United States of America.

God bless you all.

by

The Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP

Prime Minister of Jamaica

at the

Ministry of Labour and Social Security

Dedication & Naming Ceremony The Portia Simpson Miller Building

on

May 26, 2026

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 Thank you, Auntie Fae.

Leader of the Opposition,

Distinguished ladies and gentlemen in the audience and listening to us through the various media.

Today we gather in a spirit of respect, remembrance, and national gratitude to honour the life and service of a former Prime Minister, the Most Honourable Portia Lucretia Simpson-Miller. We are here to honour a Jamaican whose public life has been defined by perseverance, compassion, courage, and deep connection to the Jamaican people.

The Ministry of Labour and Social Security occupies a special place in the life of our country. The ministry stands at the point where work, dignity, protection, and opportunity meet. It deals with the worker seeking fair treatment. It deals with family in need of support. It deals with the pensioner who depends on the assurance that the state will not forget them. It deals with the employer, the trade union, the vulnerable citizen, the person with disability, the seasonal worker, the injured worker, and the Jamaican who simply wants a fair chance for a better life.

For that reason, it is fitting that during Workers’ Week, this building at 1F North Street should be dedicated in honour of the Most Honourable Portia Simpson-Miller. Her journey is well known from local government to Parliament, from ministerial service to national leadership, and ultimately to becoming Jamaica’s first woman Prime Minister.

Portia Simpson Miller broke barriers that stood for far too long, but her significance does not rest only in the offices that she held; it rests on the people who she inspired to dream. She made many Jamaicans feel seen. She spoke to communities that were often ignored. She brought to national life a language of care, a presence, and solidarity for the poor, the worker, the woman, the elderly, and the vulnerable. She understood politics not only as policy and administration, but as ultimately human contact.

Her service in labour and social security was therefore pivotal to her career and central to her outlook. She understood the worker who would leave home before dawn. She understood the woman holding a household together. She understood the young person trying to find a path. She understood the elderly citizen seeking dignity after years of contribution. These were not abstractions to her; these were the people she carried in her public life.

Under her watch, Jamaica’s labour programmes expanded opportunities for Jamaicans at home and abroad. These programmes did more than place workers overseas, they opened doors, they supported families, they sent children to school, they helped to build households, they connected Jamaican labour to international opportunity while reminding us that our people remain our greatest asset; that is an important part of her legacy.

The dignity of labour was a practical concern. It was about whether a worker could earn, whether a mother could provide, whether a family could have a chance to advance, whether a Jamaican, regardless of background, could believe that the state recognized and valued their worth. The naming of this building in her honour is therefore a proper tribute. It recognizes not only the former prime minister, but the servant leader whose political life was rooted in people. It recognizes a woman who rose through institutions that were not always easy for women, and who, by rising, widened the path for others. It also carries a message for the present.

When we name this public building after Portia Simpson-Miller, we are asking those who enter it to remember compassion, inclusion, resilience, and service to ordinary people. We are not asking them to remember that government is not an abstraction. Government is experienced at the counter, in the office, through the phone call, through the form, through the pension payments, through the programme that gives workers a chance.

For many Jamaicans, the Ministry of Labour and Social Security is one of the most human faces of the state. It is here that policy meets real life. It is here that a citizen comes not with theory, the abstraction, but with a need that is real, that is urgent, that is critical; as we say in Jamaica, oftentimes life and death and that is how our citizens expect to be treated. It is here that the values of fairness, caring, and efficiency must be made visible.

This dedication should therefore instruct us that public office must remain connected to the lives of ordinary people. It instructs us that social security is not charity. We’re not doing anybody a favour. It is a duty and oftentimes a right. It is part of the basic architecture of a just society. It instructs us that labour and social security policy is not just paperwork, but it is lives, and this is how we build our nation.

A couple months ago, I had a call with former Prime Minister Simpson-Miller’s husband, and I’m not going to discuss what we discussed. I’m not going to say that here because it was in confidence and in privacy but I want to give an assurance that the Western Children’s Hospital, which Portia Simpson-Miller went to China, negotiated with the Government of China, came back to Jamaica and announced it, that it is only proper, and there was never any other intention. I see some campaign going on all over the place. We are a country that everyone likes to campaign about something, that’s fine, not arguing about that but governments can’t always say everything upfront all at once. We have to wait until appropriate timing and so forth so sometimes our timing may not coincide with other timelines and ambitions and issues, whatever it is. It was always the intent, and I had expressed that directly to the family, and internally we had also discussed it, and I may even had said it in passing in interviews, which probably was not picked up at the time, that the hospital should be named, it is only the right thing to do, it’s appropriate that it should be named in her honour, and it will be done. We were just waiting until the hospital was finished and ready, which would have been the appropriate time to say that, but it is what it is.

It may have also escaped the media and other commentators that there was such a place as the Portia Simpson-Miller Square in Three Miles and when I became prime minister, Mama P was my mother, she usually called me her son. And then I don’t know what happened, she disowned me, but we made up afterwards. She’s always in my heart, and we’re always good friends. My mother actually worked in the ministry when she was minister for many years, and they got along very well. My mother always talks about her, and she always talks about my mother, so we have some connections there.

When we were doing the road programme in the corporate area, we removed the square and I just want to assure the members of her constituency, which adjoins my constituency, that it was never the intention to eliminate Portia Simpson-Miller Square and so when we put up the overpasses, the intention was to rename those overpasses in her honour. We actually started some work to fix up underneath the overpasses and to paint it to make it look appropriate. We will continue that, and at the right time, we will rename that entire area including the overpass and the underpass. We’re trying to figure out if it should be the Portia Simpson-Miller Overpasses or… We haven’t found the right nomenclature, but we will find the right and appropriate way to name it.

This is about legacy and in a country like Jamaica where our democracy is so robust and everything is contested, you want your legacy to be cemented, literally. You want your legacy to be in concrete so it’s not challenged and it can’t be just toppled easily, even by powerful thoughts that may come afterwards, ideas and so forth. We take this seriously, and I want to commend Minister Grange. She has been on a campaign of putting up statues and memorials and all kinds of things and naming important iconic structures in honour of great Jamaicans.

Now, let me be clear, the legacy of Michael Manley and the NHT is not in challenge. And so, for those who interpret my comments in that way, please be at ease. But I find that in our general discussions about the history of Jamaica, we are not complete. We take elements of it that suit either our political outlook or our comfort, and the point of facts are these and it is related to this issue because it’s a general philosophy that workers’ rights must be protected. And based on that philosophy, as work became more structured, more organized, more urbanized, and more corporatized, especially coming to the end of the Industrial Revolution, workers had a literal limited lifespan, in that they would work for 20, 30 years maybe, and then after that they can’t work again. They’re out of the labour force because there are people coming up wanting jobs and then what do you do? There’s no pension, there’s no way for you to survive. The notion of pensions started, I believe, the leader of the opposition pointed out that it started with 1908 then 1911 the Social Insurance Act was put in and that was a good idea and it was replicated normally around the Commonwealth, as you pointed out, but it’s an idea that spread that workers would contribute to a pension centrally managed by the state, and employers would contribute as well and that system was established in Jamaica with the formation of the National Insurance Act.

Now, as Minister Grange pointed out, it was heavily fought. It just reminds me of NARRA. Heavily fought, and in fact, it was called SIN. They termed the third National Insurance Scheme and called it SIN and look at us today. That is what makes the Jamaican democracy strong. Don’t believe any foolishness you hear people writing. Jamaica’s democracy is strong because it was robustly contested, and that model inspired other models where workers’ contribution would be used.

For example, the idea of a social pension became the basis for the idea of socially financing mortgages; that is where the funding for a mortgage pool would come from, and the mechanism to take it out of the workers’ pay already existed through the NIS system. And so, what happened was that there was an amendment made to the NIS Act to use the exact system of collecting from both workers and employers to collect from workers and employers for the NIS and for several years, the fund that was collected and the collections were administered by the NIS. It was actually one and the same until, I believe 1976, that the actual NHT Act now created which separated the NHT and the NIS, and established now an institution and a law for the NHT.

Normally I would not go into this, but I think it is important for the record because there’s so many things being said that are not necessarily accurate, not necessarily true, not necessarily complete, and my job is to tackle some of these things that are not accurate to give a broader perspective on things.

So again, I want to commend Minister Pearnel Charles and Minister Grange for the leadership, and the staff of the respective ministries who have put on this lovely event and all who have worked on these Jamaica legacy projects. I must commend this is a lovely event. I particularly like the very brief documentary on Portia Simpson-Miller. And to the family and colleagues and admirers of the Most Honourable Portia Simpson-Miller, I say this: Jamaica recognizes the magnitude of her contribution. We recognize the doors she opened. We recognize the people she served. We recognize the example she set. We have commissioned a bust in her honour. Minister Grange may say something more. Well, at the appropriate time, you will inform the public of that, and there is also a documentary that will be commissioned by the government so we want you to know that we are in the business of preserving and promoting the legacies of our leaders, not to destroy or contort. We want the legacies of our leaders to be there for the posterity and benefit of the people of Jamaica.

May all who work in the Portia Simpson-Miller building be guided by her example. May this building stand as a monument to inclusion, perseverance, and people-centred leadership, and may Jamaica continue to produce public servants worthy of such honour.

I thank you.

Labour Day calls on us to do a simple yet powerful act: to step forward in service to our country, our communities, and one another.

It reminds us that nation-building is not solely the work of Government, nor only of those formally entrusted with leadership. It is the responsibility of every citizen. Through the work of our hands, the discipline of our minds, and the generosity of our hearts, we build Jamaica.

This year, that call carries special urgency.

Hurricane Melissa left deep scars across our nation. While many communities, businesses, and families have recovered to varying degrees, there are still households without proper shelter, social amenities, and stable livelihoods. To those Jamaicans still struggling, I want you to know this: you are not forgotten.

Your Government has already committed more than $67 billion towards relief and recovery efforts. Of that amount, $10 billion has been allocated to the ROOFS Programme to support assessed households with grants to restore damaged roofs and undertake essential home repairs.

Schools and households are being repaired. We supported JPS through a strategic loan to accelerate the restoration of electricity islandwide. We executed one of the largest debris removal operations in our history across the affected parishes.

Through the National Housing Trust, the Ministry of Housing, and with support from the Government of China, more than 2,700 semi-permanent modular housing units have been secured to assist Jamaicans who have been assessed as having totally lost their homes and who are unable to rebuild immediately. These units require reinforced concrete bases before installation.

As I said in early December last year, funds donated towards hurricane recovery would be used for practical, lasting, and measurable recovery efforts.

Of the $1.4 billion donated, $600 million will go towards constructing the foundations required to begin installing the first 900 pre-built units, which have now arrived in Jamaica. The remaining funds will be used to purchase roofing materials to replenish stocks and strengthen the ongoing Government-led roof repair programme.

Our commitment is simple: to use donated funds in ways that are tangible, resilient, accountable, and traceable. We will not spend recklessly. We will not be profligate. We will spend responsibly and strategically.

Roofs repaired. Foundations built. Homes restored. These are visible and undeniable signs that resources are being used wisely and honestly. And as more accurate damage data and needs assessments become available, the Government stands prepared to make further investments to support affected households.

Yet, beyond public expenditure, we cannot place a dollar value on the volunteer effort, sacrifice, and goodwill shown by Jamaicans at home and friends across the world.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, we saw neighbours helping neighbours, communities lifting each other, and strangers stepping forward to help strangers. That is the spirit of service, sacrifice, and solidarity. That is the true meaning of Labour Day.

So, this Labour Day, I encourage every Jamaican to see himself or herself as part of our national reconstruction effort. We are not merely replacing what was lost. We are rebuilding better, safer, stronger, and smarter. This is our opportunity to correct old weaknesses, reduce future risks, and create communities that are more resilient to storms and other shocks that may come.

We may not rebuild Jamaica in a single day. But we can each do something meaningful. We can repair a leaking classroom at the community basic school. We can replace a broken window at the clinic. We can clear overgrown areas at the community centre. We can clean our front yards, gateways, drains, and sidewalks.

Small acts, multiplied across a nation, create powerful change. And in just a few days, the 2026 Hurricane Season will be upon us. By now, every Jamaican should fully understand the importance of preparation.

Use this Labour Day to inspect your home and surroundings. Identify threats to your property, community infrastructure, and personal safety.

Check your emergency supplies. Service and refuel your generators. Inspect your roof and make the repairs you can afford. Trim trees that threaten your home. Clear blocked drains and culverts near your property.

Let this Labour Day be the beginning of your hurricane preparedness.

But beyond physical rebuilding, Labour Day must also remind us of a deeper national duty:

Jamaica must become a more productive, disciplined, and efficient nation. Productivity determines how quickly we increase our output. Efficiency determines how wisely we use our resources while doing so. This is a conversation Jamaica must now have with seriousness and honesty.

For too long, some have remained trapped in outdated thinking, believing that prosperity can come without production or that effort is exploitation. And there are others who are comfortable only with paper, procedure, and obstruction, quick to criticise, slow to create, and unwilling to take responsibility for building value. That mindset cannot build a modern Jamaica.

We need a new generation of doers. Jamaicans who understand risk. Jamaicans who are willing to innovate. Jamaicans who are prepared to work not only harder but also smarter. Jamaicans who build, produce, solve, and lead.

The next generation must understand this truth: Rising wages without rising productivity only fuels inflation. Sustained increases in wages, prosperity, and living standards must come from greater output, stronger efficiency, and higher national performance.

As a people, we must embrace a new social ethos: performance matters, and performance must be rewarded. That principle must apply everywhere, but especially in the public sector, where accountability, efficiency, and performance-based systems must become standard practice.

Jamaica is known for speed, agility, and resilience. We are among the fastest people in the world. Now we must also become known as the most efficient people in getting things done.

That is why we have established the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority —NaRRA. Its mission is clear: to drive Jamaica’s reconstruction with urgency, coordination, transparency, and speed.

We will prove that Jamaica can build quickly. We will prove that Jamaica can build well. And we will prove that Jamaica can recover stronger than before.

My fellow Jamaicans, Labour Day is not only about work. It is about purpose. It is about service. It is about discipline. It is about national pride. If each of us does our part, no storm, no setback, and no challenge can defeat this nation.

Together, let us build.

Together, let us prepare.

Together, let us recover.

Together, let us strengthen Jamaica.

May God bless you, and may God bless Jamaica.

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 I think it is necessary, Mr Speaker, that I make a brief intervention on this matter. The Minister of Finance would have explained, and it is indeed in her script, that she said we reluctantly seek to extend, because I think for every Jamaican who treasures the NHT and wants to see the NHT fully maintain its statutory mission, that to use NHT funds for anything other than building housing would be of grave concern. And so I want it to be clear for the record that the government is not doing this by virtue of being in any way profligate, in being in any way ignoring the statutory mandate of the NHT or is just doing this because it has the authority to do it.

The Minister of Finance explained that this extension was necessary because of the damage that was done by Hurricane Melissa; significant damage, over US$11 billion of damage, more than 50% of our GDP. The opposition argues as if the damage has no fiscal impact, that we could use our regular fiscal measures and meet the cost of recovery, meet the cost of reconstruction, without having to put in place additional fiscal measures or extend measures that were already on the books. So, Mr Speaker, I think it’s important that the public debate acknowledges that this is a necessary measure.

I’m trying to come to grips with the leader of the opposition’s position, which is he’s not supporting the measure because we didn’t come and negotiate with him. So, it’s not about the fact that the country faces a fiscal threat, that we needed to do this, that we don’t want to do it just for do we get sake, but it is a necessary measure so it appears to me that the leader of the opposition would put the country at risk for his ego. Well, Mr Speaker, in this matter I will be the first to say, and I repeat, that this is not something that we do without taking into consideration that it was absolutely necessary, and if it were not necessary, it would not be done.

The second difficulty I’m having with the presentation by the leader of the opposition is the suggestion that somehow this measure will deprive homeowners of the opportunity, or potential homeowners of the opportunity of owning their own home, that somehow $11.4 billion from the NHT would deprive $11.4 billion of housing expenditure.

Minister Samuda, the member from North East St Ann would have addressed this matter because yes, we always have a financial challenge with the development of housing, no doubt, but the real challenge now is not a demand-side challenge, it’s not a lack-of-financing challenge. The real challenge is a supply-side issue, the absorptive capacity of the country to actually produce the number of houses that are needed to fill the housing gap. We estimate that the country would need roughly 150,000 housing units to adequately supply the demand for housing. So, this would mean the persons who are able to purchase on the open market, persons who are not able to fully afford the cost of housing, but they may need some form of subsidized housing solutions, low-income housing solutions, and persons who may be looking to improve their housing stock. We believe 150,000 solutions so whether it is a total house or access to land, that is what we would need.

Presently, if we had all the funds today to build 150,000 houses, we could not do it. We don’t have the contractors who can contract at scale. We now don’t have an enterprise-level contractor in the country who could build 10,000 houses over the next year, and that is a major issue of the supply-side constraints that face the housing market. Presently, the NHT has been tasked with developing 42,000 housing solutions. Right now, Mr Speaker, in terms of the NHT’s performance, the NHT has at the end of 2025, somewhere in the region of about 31,540 housing starts going back from 2016.

Mr Speaker, since this administration, that is the number of housing units that we have started. In terms of housing completions, 21,166. These figures may need some updating because I’m not giving you up to March of this year. In terms of mortgages, the NHT, Mr Speaker, would have since 2016 issued 67,249 mortgages. So while $11.4 billion, Mr Speaker, is significant, if you were to total up the housing expenditure on mortgages, housing starts, and housing completed, you’d be looking at $343 billion expended by the NHT on housing.

To make the point even clearer, Mr Speaker, the highest level of expenditure under the PNP administration in 2012 was $24.3 billion. Mr Speaker, in 2018, the NHT under this administration spent $28.43 billion. In 2019, $37.1 billion. In 2020, $41.57 billion. In 2021, $48.2 billion. In 2022, $46.51 billion. In 2023, $45.94 billion. In 2024, $30.24 billion. And in 2025, this is up to the 31st of March 2025, $24.4 billion. I therefore want to dispel this argument that is being purveyed in the public domain that the government taking $11.4 billion from the NHT is somehow depriving the NHT of expenditure. Every year since 2018, the NHT’s expenditure has been increasing substantially, and at points have doubled what was spent under the PNP administration so these are matters that we must concern.

In summary, I don’t need to go further than that point that I’ve made. The administration is not taking the funds from the NHT for reasons that are not solid and sound reasons. We must preserve the fiscal integrity of the government’s operations, and this fiscal integrity is something that benefits every Jamaican, and I want you to think of it this way. If we didn’t have the $11.4 billion from the NHT, it would have to come from somewhere else, likely more taxes.

Second point, Mr Speaker, there is no windfall from the government from the present geopolitical situation with oil prices. The leader of the opposition is suggesting that somehow, we are collecting more taxes on oil, on fuel. Mr Speaker, I want to be absolutely clear that we haven’t said too much about this situation, but the government has essentially taken steps that cushion the public from the full impact of the increases in oil prices and that comes at a cost, a cost that is likely to be far greater than any revenues that come from the special SET on fuel.

There is no argument that is saying that the government is getting a windfall, and therefore we don’t need to take the funds from the NHT. Those are some points, Mr Speaker, that I think it is important that the public considers when they pronounce their judgment on the government’s action in taking the funds from the NHT. It is not something that we want to do, it’s not something that we do lightly, it is something that is imperative that it be done. And we, like every other Jamaican, longs for the day when we will not have to take the funds from the NHT. That will happen as the right decisions that we are making today inure to the growth of our country, decisions like the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority which will fast track growth and development in this country because that is the only way, Mr Speaker, to increase revenues, growth, jobs for the people of Jamaica.

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Ministers Montague and Johnson Smith,

Permanent Secretaries,

The Korean delegation,

Excellencies of the Diplomatic Corps who may be here with us.

There are many Jamaicans alive today who have worked the same piece of land, some for more than 50 years, built a home on the land, farmed the land, raised family on the land, and who still cannot provide proof on paper that the land belongs to them. That gap between possession and title is not a bureaucratic inconvenience only, it is a barrier to finance, to security, to inheritance, and to the formal economy.

There’s a way to write your speeches so that the positive point stimulates the clap. This was written in the negative, but you understood the positive point, that giving title to land, giving formal access improves the economy, and that’s the positive point.

Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project is about to change that. Through a partnership with the Government of Jamaica and the Korea International Cooperation Agency, we are strengthening the institutional skills, systems, and technologies that will enable Jamaica to administer land more efficiently, more transparently, and more productively.

KOICA is providing a grant of up to US$9 million, that’s approximately JMD$1.42 billion, and this will run from 2025 to 2031. On behalf of the Government of Jamaica and the people of Jamaica, I express our sincere gratitude to the government and people of the Republic of Korea and to KOICA.

Korea’s development record speaks for itself. What is perhaps less known is that land formalization was a part of its foundation. In 1949 to 1950, Korea restructured its agricultural land tenure system, abolishing absentee landlordship and transferring ownership to those who actually cultivated the land. It was an early hard-won lesson in a principle that holds across development contexts, that knowing who owns the land and ensuring that the record reflects the reality of who owns it, but more importantly, that the people who are going to make use of the land in a formal system have ownership of the land. This is the precondition for rapid and sustained growth.

The Korea of today, with its advanced digital infrastructure and world-class institutions, was built on many things, but clarity of tenure and the discipline of public administration to manage that were among some of the important early foundations of the Korean success. We hope to develop the same structure, the same disciplined system of ownership and maintaining the administration of land that Korea developed and so we welcome the partnership. We see it as strategically important and beneficial to Jamaica’s development.

The Land Administration and Innovation Centre, which this supports, will be located at 84 Hanover Street in Kingston.

This property has been reacquired for this national purpose. It will be renovated and equipped as a modern training and innovation facility for the National Land Agency and the wider government. The renovation will include office spaces, conference rooms, computer laboratories, and storage. The project will supply equipment, desktop computers, office furniture, rugged laptops, land surveying equipment, unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, and specialized software. This is the kind of investment that shifts institutional capacity in a tangible and lasting way. The real value, however, lies in the people who will be trained there and the capability that will take root.

The programmes will include geoinformatics, cadastral mapping, surveying technician training, cybersecurity for government, land record management, and advanced GIS training using ArcGIS Pro. The ArcGIS component is particularly significant. It will prepare the NLA staff for the transition to electronic land registration solutions. Jamaica must move from fragmented, paper-heavy, manual systems to integrated, digital, and secure accessible systems. This is essential for efficiency, transparency, and public trust, and for competitiveness.

Many Jamaicans have experienced land administration as slow, opaque, and difficult to navigate. We are determined to change that. We are building a system that is faster, more accurate, more accessible, and more responsive to citizens, investors, planners, and communities.

When land is properly surveyed, mapped, recorded, and titled, the effects ripple outward. A family can access a mortgage. A farmer can use the land as collateral. An investor can access a site with confidence. Government can identify and unlock the value of public lands. Communities can establish tenure security. But importantly, disputes decline, which helps quite a bit with the reduction in domestic violence, which is now featuring as a significant component of overall violent crimes in the country as we reduce our murder rate. But infrastructure planning is also improved. Environmental management becomes more precise, and housing delivery accelerates. All these are the benefits that will be generated from this project.

A land title is more than a document, it is a platform for opportunity, and this project is about building that platform at scale. Across the world, public administration is being transformed by data, digital platforms, geospatial intelligence, automation, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. Jamaica must keep pace. We need public officers who are not merely users of imported systems, but skilled professionals capable of managing, adapting, protecting, improving, and eventually creating our own indigenous digital systems.

And that is why the capacity-building component matters. The project includes expert deployment, training, invitational programmes in Korea, in-community technical instruction, and support for student surveyors to become commissioned land surveyors. Commission surveyors will guide and supervise practical training. This addresses one of the sector’s most pressing constraint. We need a deeper pool of trained professionals.

Technology alone does not transform institutions, people do. When people have knowledge, discipline, systems, and leadership to use technology effectively, institutions change, and they change rapidly and this project recognizes that. It combines infrastructure, equipment, technical support, training, and institutional development.

The government recognizes its obligations under this partnership. We will provide the administrative support, project management, approvals, customs facilitation, and institutional coordination necessary for success. The National Land Agency will be central to this work, collaborating with the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economic Growth and Infrastructure Development, and with our Korean partners to ensure real effective delivery of all that we have promised.

I want to commend the National Land Agency for its leadership. The NLA sits at the intersection of land, law, planning, technology, economic development, and public service. Its work is technical, but its impact is profoundly human. Every improvement in land administration means a farmer, a homeowner, a small business owner, a developer, a public agency, or a community can move forward with greater certainty.

I also want to recognize the groundwork already done, the feasibility study in 2025, engagement with KOICA and partners, the record of discussion, Cabinet approvals, and the careful coordination required to transfer the Hanover Street property for public use. These unseen steps make the progress that we are seeing now visible.

As we begin this project, keep the larger goal in sight. We are building a Jamaica where land supports productivity, where public records support certainty, where technology supports service delivery, where government capacity supports national development. The Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project aligns with our vision of a modern, efficient, digital, and development-oriented public sector. It supports inclusive growth. It supports investment. It supports resilience. It supports better planning. It supports formalization of assets and empowerment of citizens. Let this centre become a place where knowledge is transferred, skills are sharpened, innovation is encouraged, and public officers are prepared for the next generation of land administration. Let it be a symbol of what partnership can achieve when it is practical, strategic, and focused on national transformation.

On behalf of the Government of Jamaica, I again thank KOICA and the Republic of Korea for this partnership. I thank the National Land Agency and all participating ministries, agencies, experts, and technical teams for their work and commitment. It is now my great pleasure to declare the Land Administration Capacity Enhancement Project officially launched.

And at the same time, I take this opportunity, since I have the rapt attention of this audience and those listening to this broadcast, to appeal to all Jamaicans. We are entering into a new phase of our development. We have, over the last decade and a half, greatly sacrificed to achieve fiscal stability. The next phase must now be robust, sustained economic growth. And as I had said earlier in my presentation, one of the important pillars of the economic growth which we seek is proper land administration. And when we say proper land administration, we want to be able to identify uniquely who owns the land, and we want to ensure that we know about the land, we have a cadastre.

We want to ensure that people who want to use the land for productive purposes can get access to use the land for productive purposes. We want to ensure that land, which is a natural asset, can also become a financial asset by acting as collateral for financing. We want to ensure that we can make proper decisions about the land, the environmental features, the geospatial features, and all of this can only be done if there is a public administration that can do two things. One, systematically register land. A few years ago, this administration went through the process of putting in the legal basis for systematic land registration. This was done also with the support of our Korean partners.

The NHT provided financing to support the process, and it is done by the government declaring certain areas and putting in place all the requirements to have land properly registered, including dispute resolution mechanisms and that has gone well. The objective was to do about 20,000 titles under this. We’re almost there. But the traditional, conventional process of ad hoc, as the minister pointed out, are voluntary, where the average person who has a piece of land but has no title can come into the NLA, bring all the documents that you have for the land, and apply for a title. That has not moved as quickly as the systematic land registration. In fact, my estimate is that in the last five years, we would have registered more titles under the systematic registration, maybe three times as many titles under the systematic registration than under the ad hoc voluntary system.

I want to appeal today to Jamaicans, go and register the land that you are on. Go to the NLA’s office. They’re not quite ready yet, and I see Cheriese, the CEO, smiling and saying, “Why is the Prime Minister setting me up like this?” However, what I do know about bureaucracies, you have to challenge them. If you leave bureaucracies in their comfort zone, nothing gets done.

I’m encouraging Jamaicans to take careful assessment of your land. Instructive in this presentation, which I’m certain that it will be glossed over or probably missed, that an important part of South Korea’s development strategy was to abandon this notion of the absentee landlord. At our stage in development, Jamaica must protect absolutely property rights, but if we are to develop, we cannot have land idle only for rent or for capital gains; that’s not realized economic benefit. Minister understands what I’m saying.

We have to realize the economic benefit of the land, and you only realize it when you’re reaping from it, you have a factory on it, you have developed housing on it, or you have protected it for an environmental asset. So, what we want to do, and it’s our stated policy, is to accelerate the utilization of all our assets in Jamaica. We have too many assets that are underutilized, and one of the main assets for us is our land, and before we can actually utilize the land fairly, transparently, and strategically, we need to know about the land. We need to have a register of it. We need to have all parcels of land titled.

Titling the land, establishing ownership, also reduces the issue of domestic violence. I call it domestic violence, but it’s inter-family violence. In Jamaica, I think people understand when I say, ‘quarrel over dead lef’. So many things today tied up in what we’re doing here, and I hope that I’ve been able to explain to the public why this is a major step. But what we will accomplish here from this is the augmentation of the systematic land titling, and give more capacity to the ad hoc or voluntary land titling process by increasing the capabilities of the NLA, by training the persons who can do the survey, by integrating technology to give greater efficiency, and by looking at the systems and making sure that they are all integrated and that will build capacity, give us more horsepower to be able to increase at scale the registration.

It is not impossible for Jamaica within the next decade or two to have every single parcel of land titled. And once you start to have titles, and you know about every square inch of land, then we can have a proper system of addresses, which we now don’t have. It becomes easier to sell and transfer land. We have a better system of estimating the value of land, and your land market, which supports your housing, construction, agriculture, becomes more efficient. These are the things that governments do, that people who write their name in the poll book don’t necessarily give credit to the government when they go to cast their vote, but these are the things that we have to do, nonetheless.

God bless you and thank you.

by

Dr the Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP

Prime Minister of Jamaica

at the

Digital Financial Inclusion and Transformation in Jamaica

Launch of the World Bank Report

on

April 23, 2026

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Ambassador the Honourable Audrey Marks, Minister of Efficiency, Innovation, and Digital Transformation; that’s a huge title. We place great importance on what you do, and that we have carved out a section of the government to address this shows the seriousness of the government in these matters.

I’m not seeing Minister Williams. Minister Williams should be here, and I don’t see the financial secretary here. Well, in their place, let me acknowledge Minister Hill and other members of the government and permanent secretaries who may be here.

Mr Harish Natarajan, Practice Manager, Financial Inclusion and Infrastructure, Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation (FCI), World Bank and other members of the World Bank team. Harish, I like your title, Practice Manager; that’s the proper term. I’ve never heard it before, but I like it. I think I will adopt it.

Dr Wayne Robertson, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Jamaica,

Representatives of public and private sector bodies,

Representatives of the media,

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a good afternoon, and this afternoon’s discussions have been both timely and substantive. They have brought forward valuable insights, grounded in data, experience, and practical engagement.

I wish to acknowledge the contributions of the World Bank, our national stakeholders, and our development partners whose work continues to strengthen Jamaica’s policy landscape. What has emerged clearly from this dialogue is a balanced understanding of where Jamaica stands, recognising both the meaningful progress we have made and the significant opportunities that remain ahead.

Importantly, this engagement reflects a shared commitment to evidence-based policy, innovation, and reform that is practical and implementable. By the way, this doesn’t mean that we’re not going to target things that may be difficult; this is still an expression of our ambition. The true value of these discussions, however, will not be measured by the quality of analysis alone, but by the strength of the actions and the partnerships that follow; that is a standard by which we must judge ourselves.

Jamaica understands resilience. It is not an abstract concept to us. It is a lived experience embedded in our national story, but resilience alone is not enough. Resilience allows a nation to withstand difficulty; it does not by itself guarantee progress. The true test of leadership is whether moments of disruption are transformed into opportunities for advancement. To recover is necessary; to advance is imperative.

Recovery restores what was lost. Resurgence creates something greater than what existed before. That distinction is not rhetorical. It has practical consequences for every policy choice we make, particularly in the context of how we approach post-Melissa reconstruction. A nation that is rebuilding has a choice that every stable nation has but rarely gets to execute. We can restore what existed, or we can decide to build what should have existed.

Melissa has forced the reconstruction of roads, schools, health facilities, and housing at a scale that would otherwise have taken us decades to do. The question is whether we do this with the systems and standards of the past, or whether we use this moment to embed digital infrastructure, resilient design, and modern governance into the foundations of the Jamaica we are building forward. That is the obligation of leadership, to ensure that the Jamaica which emerges from this is stronger, more connected, and more prepared than the one that existed before Melissa.

This means greater investment and genuine innovation. It means new ideas becoming new industries, becoming new jobs and new opportunities. It means refusing to be constrained by systems that no longer serve us, outdated processes, unnecessary friction, and governance that moves slower than the economy. It is designed to support, and it means ensuring that growth when it comes is not concentrated in the hands of a few but reaches across communities and generations. That is precisely why we are establishing the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority.

Construction at the scale and speed required cannot be managed through ordinary administrative channels at ordinary administrative speed. NaRRA’s mandate is clear: move fast, coordinate across institutions, cut through bureaucracy without cutting corners, and deliver results that are visible to the people who most need them. At the center of that transformation is digital capability. Countries are no longer competing solely on geography and natural resources.

I recently had an opportunity to address a body of well-established Jamaicans overseas, and I made the point that the old way of thinking about our economy and our society, which we have had that frame of thought for the last 50 years, will not carry us for the next 50 years. One of the ways in which we think of ourselves, we like to think of ourselves as having an exceptionally well-placed island in terms of our geography, so our geography is an asset. We like to say we’re the center of the Caribbean; we are in close proximity to all the shipping lanes; therefore, logistics is such a great opportunity for us, and it is, but that alone, in and of itself, is not the way forward.

We like to think of ourselves as a fairly well-resourced island. We’ve had bauxite, we have some of the best quality foods, and in terms of agriculture and agroprocessing, we have great opportunities, and limestone. We have all kinds of resources, so we tend to look at our economic opportunities in terms of geography and in terms of resources, but for us to compete and take advantage of those, we have to now consider agility efficiency as a resource.

Indeed, countries that don’t have our geography, that don’t have our resources, are outcompeting us, have far larger GDP than we do several times over, and what is the main resource that they have? Agility and efficiency; they create an environment where people want to come and live, want to do business. I mean, that’s what we say in our Vision 2030: Jamaica, the place of choice to live, work, do business, and raise families. We must truly change our mindset to make efficiency and productivity a resource for Jamaica. That will be the new frame of thinking about our economy, about our society; efficiency as a resource, productivity as a resource.

Countries are no longer competing solely on geography and natural resources. They are competing on agility. They’re competing on how efficiently they can move data and, on the ability to deploy technology effectively. We need to embrace digital transformation. We need to embrace digital society. We have seen this clearly in the case of countries like Estonia, which rebuilt its entire public administration around a digital identity and data exchange architecture, not simply moving existing processes online, but redesigning how the state functions.

The result is a public service that operates with a fraction of the bureaucracy at significantly lower cost and with measurably higher citizens’ trust. That is the standard of ambition we must hold ourselves to. So it’s not digitization for digitization’s sake because it sounds great, or that’s the next fad; that’s not what we are about, but a fundamental redesign of how we govern and how we serve.

Jamaica has already taken many meaningful steps in this direction. You could look at the Tax Administration Jamaica online platform with reduced compliance costs for thousands of businesses. One of the things that I’m really happy about is that I was able to move through quickly, with the support of Minister Vaz and Minister Marks, was the motor vehicle registration online and the removal or redefining of the requirement for fitness. People stop me all the time to say, thank you, Prime Minister, I don’t have to be in this long line. And it’s really meaningful that we did that as a sign to the public to say, if you embrace digitization, this is how much it will save you in real time and resources.

We have been taking some steps, and these are not isolated improvements. They are part of a broader shift towards a more responsive and citizen-centered state. A small entrepreneur in Clarendon can now access markets beyond local boundaries, reaching customers across Jamaica and internationally. Manufacturers can optimize supply chains through digital systems. Tourism operators can connect instantly with global audiences, and these are practical transformations that improve competitiveness and generate growth.

In education, we are again integrating digital transformation in terms of how we train our students. We’re now able to bring more rural students into access training.  And in finance, the implications are even more promising. Digital platforms, online banking, electronic transfers, mobile applications, and Jamaica’s JAM-DEX system should be making transactions faster, safer, and more convenient is in my script, but I want to add one more; the Governor of the Bank of Jamaica and all the bankers were here, Audrey; cheaper. And notice that I didn’t say more affordable; transaction costs must go down.

I should not be considering the cost of transferring money online; I shouldn’t have to have that consideration. The Governor of the Bank of Jamaica, if we use the RTGA system, we shouldn’t have to consider a cost. Read my expressions, not just my words. And I think this is where the effort really needs to be focused on, digitization for financial inclusion. We have not moved fast enough on this matter. We took a step; we invested in JAM-DEX. One would’ve thought that by now the take-up on the use of JAM-DEX would’ve been much more than it is.

One of the reasons why I have appointed a minister for this is to ensure that it happens. There are just too many excuses, too many interests that are divergent. It’s not in Jamaica’s interest not to have a fully digital financial system, and whatever it takes to get it done, minister, you have my 100% support. We must get it done.

During the pandemic, for the first time, Jamaica had the ability to provide social welfare interventions to its citizens. The problem was not money at that time; the problem was how do we get the money to the people virtually because the pandemic prevented physical transactions. And that is when we really understood the significant social loss of not having a fully banked society, of not having financial inclusion.

It was a nightmare to get people registered, get their bank accounts, to individually identify them, and the funny thing is that when we went to Parliament, this time it wasn’t about money; we were in Parliament discussing the distribution of care packages for communities that we had to quarantine and the discussion by the opposite side was that just give the people the food packages, man, don’t ask them for any IDs. We well knew that the same people who are saying that would come back to the PAAC and the PAC and say, how did you give out food packages to people, and you can’t identify them.

So, we knew that whatever we did, we had to have a strong accountability mechanism. Had we at that time structured and delivered the NIDS (National Identification System), and had a fully digital payment and transaction platform with the society fully banked, it would be the push of a key on a keyboard and the delivery of the resources to the people who needed them. In identifying people who should receive whatever care or support packages, everyone would have their ID simply to show, and the verification process would be easy, but we know the history of the opposition to having this kind of digital platform and identification.

One did not think that four or five years after we would have Hurricane Melissa, where communities were cut off, and we would have to again provide welfare benefits in mass, or care packages, humanitarian relief packages to persons. And then the question again would arise, how do we give out packages to people we can’t identify, and how did you use the money that you got?

This is a perfect example of how the integration of technology reduces bureaucracy and improves accountability. We need to get this done, Minister. We have been talking about it, and we’ve been going around in circles. As I said, there are divergent perspectives on a unified payment platform, divergent perspectives on which systems to use. We need to make some final decisions and put in place the legislation. Legislation, much of it is already in place, and we may need to use moral persuasion on the actors to ensure that the digital transformation in the financial sector, in particular, moves quickly, and that when it is done, the promise of faster transactions, more convenient transactions, but I’m going to stick to my term, cheaper transactions. Jamaicans understand when I say cheaper versus less expensive or affordable. The transaction costs are too high, much too high.

I think I’ve made my point, so thank you, everyone.

by

Dr the Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP

Prime Minister of Jamaica

at the

NHT’s 50th Anniversary Church Service

Webster Memorial United Church

on

April 19, 2026

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Good morning, church.

Pardon me while I get my sermon in order. This is a kind of audience that inspires you to preach because I know you will listen, and you all look so well. Thank you for coming out and supporting the NHT.

Allow me to do the formalities. I salute General Astor Carlyle. Forgive me, Reverend, but you know he has another capacity. Reverend Astor Carlyle, Senior Minister of the Webster Memorial United Church,

My friend, Senator Professor Floyd Morris, representing the Leader of the Opposition and Mrs Morris,

Mr Linval Freeman, Chairman. And I see the past chairman here and other members of the board of the National Housing Trust,

Mr Martin Miller, Managing Director and members of the executive and broader NHT family. Thank you for your service.

Members of the Webster Memorial United Church and other specially invited congregants,

Members of the media,

Jamaicans listening here at home and in the diaspora, it is a wonderful morning in Jamaica.

Today, we gather in a spirit of gratitude, reflection, and renewed purpose. We give thanks not only for 50 years of service by the National Housing Trust, but for what that service represents: security for families, dignity for citizens, and the steady construction of a nation one home, one community at a time, for several generations.

This anniversary is appropriately framed under the theme ” Building Communities, Housing Generations”, that is both a declaration of mission and a record of impact. For five decades, the NHT has stood as one of Jamaica’s most important institutions of social transformation, turning contributions into opportunity and policy into lived reality. Nehemiah 2:18, Let us rise up and build. So, they strengthen their hands for this good work; that’s the admonition this morning.

But anniversaries are not only moments to celebrate what has been done. There are moments to define what must be done because we meet at a time when Jamaica has faced one of its greatest tests in recent history. The recent hurricane did not merely damage infrastructure, it disrupted lives, displaced families, and exposed vulnerabilities that now we must confront with clarity and resolve. Entire communities were affected, homes were lost, roofs torn away. For many Jamaicans, the very foundation of their security, their homes were shaken and, in that moment, the question was not whether Jamaica would rebuild, the question was will we rebuild better? Not what we had before, but what we should have had. More importantly, what we could have. Would we rebuild quickly but weakly or would we rebuild deliberately but stronger? It is in answering that question that the National Housing Trust has assumed a central and defining role.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, the NHT moved decisively as an active agent of national recovery. A special disaster relief grant of up to $500,000 was made available to the most vulnerable: pensioners, low-income households, and those unable to take on additional debt. The NHT also procured 2,500 semi-permanent housing solutions at a cost of US$19 million for families who had lost their entire home. In addition, a hurricane relief loan of up to $3.5 million was introduced at concessional interest rates of just 2% enabling Jamaicans not only to repair, but to upgrade, to reinforce and to rebuild to higher standards of resilience.

These are real interventions deliver delivering real support to real people but even as the NHT responds to immediate needs, its role is far greater than recovery alone. It is about rebuilding Jamaica at scale. Today, NHT is managing, and in my script, it says a pipeline, but I’ve said to my script writers do not use the term pipeline. You can’t see what is in the pipeline. We have a train line; you’ll see what is on the track coming. We have a train line of over 41,000 housing solutions across the island that includes approximately 10,700 units under construction, nearly 6,000 at the contract stage, more than 11,500 in procurement and 11,600 in planning and design.

New developments such as Longville Meadows in Clarendon and Friendship Phase 2 in St Elizabeth together delivering over 2,800 housing solutions are already underway, and in the coming financial year alone, the NHT will invest approximately $50 billion in housing development alongside an additional $21 billion in subsidies to support affordability. That level of investment is ambitious but necessary because let us be clear, Jamaica’s housing challenge is a matter of supply.

For too long, we have approached housing primarily through the lens of access to financing for home buyers, but increasing loan limits without increasing supply only drives up prices. The real constraint has been land, infrastructure approvals, and construction capacity, and that is why the NHT is now shifting focus towards large scale master plan developments that can deliver housing at the scale Jamaica requires.

The next major development in this regard, the Greater Innswood Development will be led by the NHT as a model of integrated planning and execution. This is the direction in which Jamaica must go; not small, fragmented interventions, but coordinated large scale solutions, not just housing units but communities, not just small developments, individualized and incremental, but planning at scale, coordinated and integrated. Moreover, we must build with resilience in mind. That means stronger building standards. It means better land use planning. It means relocating development away from high-risk zones, and it means ensuring that every new home built today can withstand the realities of tomorrow. The NHT is central to that transformation, but just as important, the NHT is ensuring that this transformation is inclusive.

We are expanding access to those who serve and sustain our society: the teachers, nurses, firefighters, and members of our security forces, will now benefit from reduced mortgage rates, recognizing both their service and their need for stability. Young Jamaicans will also see increased opportunities. Twenty per cent of NHT housing solutions will now be reserved for persons under 35, this is double the previous allocation with up to $2 million available to assist with deposit. And for existing homeowners, access to improved financing has been accelerated ensuring that families can maintain, upgrade, and expand their homes more easily.

Housing is not an isolated sector. It is the foundation of a functioning society, and that is why the work of the NHT is so central, not only to recovery, but to Jamaica’s long-term development. As we reflect on 50 years, we must recognize that this institution has evolved from a housing provider into a national development engine. So, then friends, the question is, what will be the role of the NHT in the next 50 years? And that is my job to plan and to direct policy, so I jotted down a few thoughts about the next 50 years that I wanted to share with this very attentive audience.

Now, very quickly, Jamaica has what is described as a fairly moderate rate of urbanization. If you were to compare Jamaica with, let’s say, a country like Israel, Israel has about twice the landmass of Jamaica with about almost three times the population, and they have about 440 persons per square kilometre. Jamaica has 255 persons per square kilometre. Singapore is about the size of St James. They have about 8,000 persons per square kilometre in their country. Luxembourg, which is, again, a very small country, probably smaller than Singapore, is about 260 persons per square kilometre and Trinidad and Tobago is about 290 persons per square kilometre.

I introduced this variable for your consideration for you to contextualize Jamaica. Jamaica is not overpopulated. Relative to other countries in the world, we could take more people. The question then is where would we house them and how will we house them because the truth is we’re not housing the people we have now. The question to that is, why have we not been able to build out?

There are many answers. There are cultural issues, our economic circumstances; many issues, our planning and regulatory environment, but a large part of the challenge has been that we have allowed housing to take place organically. In other words, government’s intervention has not overtaken individual housing decision making. The NHT 50 years ago was an attempt to do this for government to intervene in the housing market and increase the pace of housing over and above informal housing decisions. Can you imagine a Jamaica where- I give you three scenarios, a youngster goes to university, graduates, has a good salary, renting for a few years and now wants to transition into owning their own home; there’s just simply not enough housing options for that person, so that person will probably remain in the rental market for a little while, probably much longer than they would want.

Let’s take the youngster who is living in the family home, an argument would’ve arisen and it’s no longer comfortable to live in that family home, they have to find somewhere to live. They can’t afford land, there is no housing solution that caters for their income bracket, they have to live. What is going to happen? Either they’re going to build a little shack on their family land or they’re going to go somewhere and let me just use the frank terms. I don’t mean to disrespect anyone but they’re going to squat and there are circumstances of persons who genuinely now have reached this point in their lifecycle where they have worked long enough, they have saved long enough, and they’re looking for a house, they’re ready to establish family, and when they get onto the housing market, the more of them that get into the housing market, the higher the price will be. So, they qualify for the NHT, they get the various loan products from the NHT, but the more of those persons that enter the market with the limited supply of housing stock, all that does is to drive up the price of the house and that has been the case for the last 50 years.

There have been occasions when we have caught up or have planned ahead. For example, Portmore would be an attempt in that regard. We need to build housing at scale, but we now face a challenge. In other words, we have taken most of the lands that we have that are the best and suitable land for building houses, and we have built on them already so the lands that we are now taking on, most of them are marginal and require high levels of investment in infrastructure to make them affordable and accessible and so that is the big challenge.

The next strategy for housing is that we have to increase urbanization. Now, I know when I say this, I can see the bells going off. Urbanization, such a bad thing and the usual critique you will hear, and I encourage persons to think before they criticize, think before they jump to a conclusion. Singapore is 100% urbanized, but if you were to compare the urban environment of Singapore to the environment of Jamaica, which would be better in terms of cleanliness and sanitation, in terms of efficiency and ease of movement, in terms of general productivity of the entire society.

Urbanization does not mean the destruction of the environment. Urbanization, in fact, means a proper plan to minimize the use of land space to preserve the untouched environment, and that is a way in which I would want Jamaicans to start to think about urbanization. The history of Kingston flows out of Port Royal. It is the destruction of Port Royal because of the earthquake that caused Kingston to evolve. It was not a planned city, and it will take this generation for the next 50 years to properly plan our urban spaces. The government has a strategy, and we are incrementally executing the strategy, but now we are going to go full force in the implementation of the strategy.

The first part of the strategy was to rebuild the urban centres of each parish. If you think about it, the design of the administrative governance of the country was that you have the country divided into parishes and then each parish would have an urban centre with the seat of the local government there and the provision of the urban services. What has happened to all of those urban centres? They are not able to carry the populations around them and provide the services in convenient and dignified ways. They’re all overcrowded, there’s no space for pedestrians to walk, you can’t find places for taxis to park; it’s all chaos so we have to rebuild.

We must rebuild all our urban spaces, and we have started. We’re doing that now in Morant Bay where we have provided a world class urban Centre, and it will take some time for that to be stood up properly, but we’re putting in the elements. Then we have moved over into Port Antonio, where the BoundBrook Centre is now being built. The hurricane has accelerated the process so now we’re going to tackle Black River and Falmouth, and we have plans for Negril and Savanna-la-Mar. Right across Jamaica, we’re going to rebuild the urban centres, and the objective of this is to increase national productivity and efficiency.

The recent traffic gridlock that we experienced is just a symptom of not just poorly planned infrastructure but aged infrastructure and infrastructure that simply cannot meet the demands being placed on it. We have made a commitment for 70,000 new houses, which we intend to deliver. The NHT as an obligation to deliver 41,000 of those. Once those are delivered, then we’re going to pivot and we’re going to start to now focus on infilling the existing communities that have been built 50 years ago. They need repair, the sewage plants are not working, the roads are in potholes, many of those houses we may have to knock them down and put up new structures there so the NHT has to help to support that process of infilling and redevelopment of existing communities, and that has to be the focus for the next 50 years if we’re going to make Jamaica the place of choice. Our infrastructure as it is, does not put us in good stead to be considered first world and competitive.

Thank you so much for being such a rapt audience attentively listening to what I’m saying, and I hope that my comments are appropriately understood and will be properly analyzed and not subject to some of the unthoughtful comments that people make on sometimes very deep and profound issues. Jamaica really needs to start to examine itself truly in terms of what we need and I’m seeing in the audience that there is great understanding.

God bless you and thank you. Congratulations to the NHT for 50 years.