Official Launch of the Rebuild Jamaica Initiative
Keynote Remarks
By
The Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
At the
Official Launch of the Rebuild Jamaica Initiative
August 5, 2024
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Thank you, Fae. The Government of Jamaica has decided to make cash payments as grants to persons whose houses were damaged by Hurricane Ivan. Instead of using the voucher system, which was previously announced, Minister of Water and Housing Donald Buchanan made a disclosure in the House of Representatives yesterday, October 12th, during his updates on the programme of relief and national reconstruction.
Mr Buchanan told the House that having decided on the quantum of assistance for affected persons, our next challenge was to decide on a system of distribution which would ensure as far as possible that the funds allocated were used for the purpose intended. He said on closer examination and with discussions, it was agreed that the voucher system method of payment was not adequate given the present circumstances. He went on to say while there was the perception that the voucher system provided guarantees against corruption, this had not been the experience since in the past there had been occasions where beneficiaries and suppliers had collaborated to substitute a discounted cash payment for the vouchers. This is very diplomatic language. We have therefore decided to pay these assistance grants with checks, which will be cashed by the beneficiaries and which will give them the flexibility to make optimum use of the funds in the present circumstances. It’s a very interesting article, which is why I’m I’m going through it.
Mr Buchanan stressed that the assistance was not intended to replace totally destroyed units or to compensate to the level of loss sustained as government is not an insurer of buildings. It is assisting persons to put their lives back together. Persons whose houses were totally destroyed would receive $20,000 while persons whose houses were severely damaged would receive a grant of $7,500 to $10,000. Meanwhile, a grant of $5,000 would be paid out for other damage. Payments would be made based on government assessments, which were now being carried out, the minister said. This article was published October 13, 2004, and the actual speech was made the day before in parliament. I want you to absorb this a little bit.
Sometimes the conversation in our country does not anchor itself in facts. Sometimes we go off and the conversation does not reflect the history or the accurate situation. It’s very dangerous for a society to carry on conversation amongst itself with incorrect and false information. It creates false perceptions and false expectations, it leads to perverse actions and perverse outcomes. My job as your prime minister is to sometimes bring back the conversation to align it with the history, what actually happened and to ground the conversation into some sort of factual basis.
Hurricane Ivan happened in 2004, that’s 20 years ago. The government was able then to announce a package about a month after the hurricane hit Jamaica. The hurricane hit Jamaica between the 11th and the 12th of September 2004. And by the 12th of September, the minister with responsibility was making an announcement in parliament. 20 years later, we were hit by hurricane Beryl and within two weeks, I believe we made the announcement somewhere about the 12th or before of 1 billion dollars that will go towards recovery and rebuilding and by the 3rd, we weren’t only assessing, we are now actually going to deliver checks.
When we were hit by Ivan, we had to rely on 3.3 billion dollars of grants. Most of it would have come from the European Union, from our American and Canadian partners. Today, by virtue of the change in our fiscal management and fiscal arrangements, we have put in place buffers and insurance for which we can draw down for the immediate response 5 billion dollars of your own funds in addition to insurance funds so that we can respond to our own management of the disaster.
I want you to just think on that because this is what it means to be independent. I make these points because it is important for us to reflect on where we are coming from and where we are so when the merchants of gloom and doom and ‘nuttn nah gwaan’ peddle their falsehoods in the public square, those falsehoods must be confronted by the facts. Jamaica today is a different place than it was 20 years ago.
Bear in mind the challenge that the government 20 years ago would have faced this business of distributing a relief benefit in such a way as to avoid corruption of the benefit. It’s the same challenge we face today and it is very important that any relief that we are going to give is not in any way tainted by any form of corruption whether it be that the beneficiary tries to convert the benefit for a use other than for what the grant was given as eloquently described by the then minister trying to get a discounted voucher. Meaning that if they got a voucher for $30,000 that they would have gone to a hardware and said to the hardware “just give me $20,000 worth of goods, or just give me $20,000 in cash and you keep the rest”, then you didn’t really need the benefit. Somebody else could have gotten that benefit. So that issue face the government then, and we face the same problem today.
Notice that when the minister made the statement, he said, “we have now determined what the quantum of the support is going to be. We are now going to finalize the assessments. Now, what would be involved in the process of assessment? There are three factors involved essentially in the process of assessment. The first process is to identify the person who was affected. And what does that process involve? The determination of one’s identity and we have this problem right across Jamaica, not just for the delivery of relief benefits, but for everything that we do. If you have to open a bank account, identity. If you have to get your path cheque, identity. If you have to collect your pension, identity. Identity is not about an invasion of your privacy.
Identity is about being able to fulfill the requirement for accountability in any transaction between the citizen and the state. The same person, the same citizen who does not want to be identified is the same citizen who wants accountability for the funds that are spent in their name. You’re not going to get both.
Now, there is a confusion in the minds of many of our citizens that anonymity and privacy is the same thing. They’re not. If you want to get a benefit from the government, you cannot be anonymous. If you are anonymous, how can we account for you? But if you don’t want the public to know that you got a benefit, then that can be private. And so the system that we are trying to build is one that will preserve your privacy, but enhance accountability and I hope that clarifies that in the minds of many suspicious or sceptical Jamaicans.
The government back then did not have a national identification system. TRN would have existed, but the database was not robust so they wouldn’t be able to check against the TRN so the verification really would have depended on an agent of the state, meaning someone from the ministry going to verify. You may have to depend on a justice of the peace or community knowledge to say, yes, person X is actually person X and he should get the benefit. But in that system, the probability of error, meaning the probability of you drawing a cheque for a person who said that they are Tom Stroke, but they are not, the probability is very high. So you couldn’t really guarantee to the public accounts committee or the public appropriations committee that there was a high level of accuracy in the beneficiary that received the grant and governments would have had to just accept that at the time.
So, for us, we have invested in building out the National Identification System. It was derailed and stalled and every time there is an emergency, I look back at it and say, if we had it earlier, we would have been able to more efficiently and quickly distribute benefits but we have had those experiences, which we can only say will make the system stronger and more robust.
The difference between then and now is that, yes, we haven’t perfected the system yet, but we have a robust verification system through the TRN and we are now very close to the establishment of a national identification system where all the beneficiaries would need to do to establish their identity is to present the NIDS. Nobody from the ministry would have to come again and ask, so what’s your mother’s name? What’s your father’s name? What’s your TRN number? What’s this? What’s that? Who are you related to? And by the way, every time there is a disaster, this process has to go through again. It can take weeks so for the government to be able to move the distribution from eight weeks as it were after Hurricane Ivan to now four weeks there about, shows that we have made significant improvement, but it could be even faster if we had a national identification system.
The second is to identify what was damaged. And here again, there is scope for corruption. An agent from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security who is charged with doing the assessment, a social worker sometimes, would go into a community and they might be greeted by a group of people who said “Come, Miss, Let me show you my house that is damaged. Now this house was damaged long before Hurricane Beryl and they say, see, look how the hurricane mash up my house. This poor social worker from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, she’s not going to know that and so there are these kinds of scams which can take place.
So when we go to do assessments, we have to employ more technology because in today’s world the capabilities exist that you can look at a community from the satellite and see which house was standing before hurricane Beryl and which house is not standing. In fact, the artificial intelligence technology exists where you don’t even have to go into the field by satellite imagery assessment, you can say which house was damaged and the software is so sophisticated you can even say what is the nature of the damage.
Now, we have not deployed that in our system yet but I’m saying it here in the hearing of the permanent secretary and the minister that you need to consider this not just for this disaster but for future disasters so that we can assess aerially using technology which would give you a more rapid and accurate assessment of damage. Of course, you still have to do what is called ground truthing. You still have to go in the field and actually inspect but it would help to eliminate those false claims. Now remember, every false claim denies someone who is truly and genuinely in need.
Now, the third element of the assessment is to determine the nature and the kind of damage and which category of relief the person should get and that element has what we call fiscal considerations, meaning what resources, financial resources can the government put towards the recovery effort in this regard? And I don’t want to go and read what the benefit was at that time versus what the benefit is now. Even with inflation, what we are giving now is substantially more than what was given in 2004 or in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit.
When Hurricane Sandy hit, I believe it was $60,000 for total or severe damage and something like $30,000 for minor damage. In Hurricane Ivan, it was $20,000 for severe or total damage and between $7,500 and $10,000 for severe damage and $5,000 for minor damage.
Today, I’m pleased to announce that we will give $400,000 to assist persons in the recovery from the total loss of their homes, $150,000 for severe damage and $50,000 for minor damage. And mind you, this is from the Government of Jamaica alone. You would have heard what our representative from the UN pointed out that they too will be giving some cash grants. I suppose those will be conditional. The UN through the UN system, they will be giving cash grants as well. I’m not aware of what the magnitude of those will be but I’m certain that persons who are beneficiaries for the rebuild programme will also qualify and our good friends from GEM, (Global Empowerment Mission), will also be assisting not with cash I gather, but with reconstruction materials and so forth. So it’s clear that the benefits that will flow to persons who have been affected- and from the World Food Programme as well will be significant, but I would like to just reread what the then minister pointed out, former minister who was my good friend, Danny Buck we call him, Donald Buchanan. I like to he put it. He stressed that the assistance was not intended to replace totally destroyed units or to compensate to the level of loss sustained and this is a quote from him “as government is not an insurer of buildings. It is assisting persons to put their lives back together.” So in essence, the same sentiments would exist today as it relates to how the government responds but today the Government is able to respond with much greater quantum of assistance than before.
Now, on the three elements of the assessment programme that I mentioned, I have given directives to the minister of labour and social security that this must move with great speed and alacrity. While on tour in North Central Clarendon, I let slip that i expect that these benefits should be finished by back-to-school. Now, that might be a very hard task but I’m still setting it as the timeline and I know how difficult it is now. It’s the holiday season, ministry staff people might be going on their vacation and they themselves are preparing for back to school but I appeal to you, to your better conscience, to your love of country, to put in the effort to ensure that your fellow Jamaicans, many of whom have no bed, have no clothes, have nowhere to live, their children don’t know how they’re going to go back to school, have that compassion to put in that effort, show that- not sympathy, but empathy for the people who are suffering to push through and deliver these benefits to them as quickly as possible.
As I step down from this platform, I go back to my office to meet with JPS. I have tried not to speak too much on this matter because JPS is a private company. They do, however, perform an indispensable and most important public function which is regulated under law by an independent utilities regulator which essentially takes the government out of the regulatory space, but it does not take away the legislative authority of the government and what we are seeing in terms of the return of electricity to some areas of the country, it is not being done in a way for which the government is satisfied.
In fact, we are deeply dissatisfied by the way in which electricity is being returned to some affected communities and it does cause me to take a second look at the legislative framework which governs this new space of how utilities are delivered and regulated. It would appear to me that there needs to be tighter regulation and it falls on the legislators now to start to look at the instruments that govern how the utility operates and how the utility operator operates to ensure that the customer is protected, particularly in the time of an emergency and a disaster and I want to just make that known publicly here that that process will begin shortly.
So, ladies and gentlemen and particularly for those who will be receiving your cheques today, just under four weeks from the disaster, please use the cheques wisely. Minister, I gather that the first set of persons would be those who would have suffered total loss and my understanding is that they will be given a first tranche of $200,000 which we expect to be able to see the value that you would have received for the $200,000 and then the other $200,000 will follow shortly thereafter.
So, this is a strategy put in place to make sure that the funds are not used for things that are not directed for your recovery so you will get $200,000 upfront. If it’s blocking you’re going buy and cement and steel, get those and then we come look at it, say, yes, you have done something with the funds, you get the other $200,000. We must ensure that there is value for money and I tell you why as I close. In another six months or so, everybody forget that there was a disaster. Everybody forget that there was pressure on the government to deliver quickly and then the next thing we know, we’re called up before the P AAC and the PAC and we are pillared that we didn’t put in place any system and there was no accountability and there is corruption; somehow the government was gone with all of the money. We are not going to get caught in that. And then the purveyors of falsehood they run with that all over when ‘nuttn no go suh’ so we’re going to make sure that there are systems of accountability in place, but at the same time, we understand your urgency. So this government is, as they say, chew gum and ride or rather, ride and whistle.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.