Keith Duncan tells Senate NaRRA will unify Melissa rebuilding without absorbing ministries

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Government Senator Keith Duncan has rejected suggestions that the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) is amassing outsized clout, or that its mandate will elbow aside current ministries, statutory bodies and local councils in a manner that strains constitutional boundaries or unsettles how government normally works. He voiced firm backing for the new agency tasked with guiding extensive reconstruction following Hurricane Melissa, which left an estimated US$12.2 billion in physical damage and economic loss. Speaking in the Senate last Friday as members debated the NaRRA Bill—which was ultimately approved, permitting the authority to be set up—Duncan laid out a detailed response to the criticism.

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

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

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

He told Parliament he has spent his entire working life in the private sector, "and I can tell you without qualification that many serious investment proposals do not get executed in Jamaica due to the bureaucratic nightmare. That is the problem this bill solves".

He also drew attention to the Facilitated Acceleration of Strategic Transformation (FAST Jamaica) framework Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness unveiled in March during the Budget Debate, noting it would operate as a companion effort to NaRRA to hasten sizeable capital ventures and broader expansion. He portrayed FAST Jamaica as "a legislative commitment that an investor will receive a clear approval or a rejection, not silence, and not being passed around from one agency to another, and not an invitation to come back in six months when the relevant committee has reconvened".

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

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

The senator maintained that concentrating authority in one coordinating hub mirrors what succeeded in other countries after widespread ruin, listing New Zealand after the severe 2011 tremor, Nepal's National Reconstruction Authority in 2015 and Japan's National Reconstruction Agency in 2011. He insisted that sprawling recovery programmes need direction that diffuse arrangements cannot supply.

FAST Jamaica, he continued, supplies a statutory fast lane for private schemes topping US$15 million in 12 designated priority sectors. "This policy decision of setting the threshold at US$15m is of fundamental importance to what FAST Jamaica can achieve as it opens up opportunities for Jamaican private sector companies, for diaspora investors, for regional capital, for consortiums of smaller firms pooling resources to invest in projects," he said.

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

Duncan likewise pointed to a US$5.5 billion financing gap, saying only US$6.7 billion had so far been received or committed by multilaterals. "My hope is that, with NaRRA, the era of proposals sitting on desks for years is finally over and private capital will come to the table and utilise the FAST pillar and close the funding gap of US $5.5 billion," he said.