Yaneek Page | Government procurement is a confession: Who will we become?

In every democratic society, at every level of government, almost every dollar spent by the State tells a story.

It is a confession. In fact, if you study a country’s procurement records closely enough, you will expose the memoirs of that government’s true priorities and loyalties. Beyond what it says it values, to what it consistently funds, and who continuously benefits. This is why procurement matters more deeply than most public discourse allows.

Over the years I’ve written repeatedly about procurement: the rules, global best practices, who is excluded, and why transparency matters. This article is a bit different because at this stage, the question is no longer whether we can decipher if accountability is real or performative or institutional versus personal. It is if, as a country, we truly understand what procurement reveals about our future.

In Jamaica, the 2025–2026 period has made this unavoidably clear. Recent headlines involving the auditor general’s findings on Starlink’s acquisition, alongside revelations that roughly J$870 million in agricultural contracts was awarded without the required evidence of a procurement committee review, are not mere administrative disagreements or concerns. These are signals of whether the country is moving with intention or improvising under pressure. To the analytical mind, procurement in the moment may tell the story of a system currently in conflict with itself.

Procurement as a moral confession

Government is the largest consumer of goods and services in any economy. In Jamaica, that purchasing power runs into the billions each year. How that power is used determines whether a country advances or merely shuffles along, talking about equitable growth while failing to manufacture it.

If procurement becomes consistently reactive, accidental, or permanently “emergency driven,” the State is confessing an often-resisted truth: it lacks a long-term vision for how public spending should shape the economy.

By contrast, when procurement is used intentionally, it becomes one of the most powerful tools of national design available. It allows a government to decide, deliberately, what kind of economic ecosystem it wants to build and then fund that outcome into existence. Post-Melissa, and against the backdrop of international upheaval, Jamaica’s growth can’t be incidental. If government ministers profess growth while ignoring who it buys from, how and why then they are speaking a language they don’t understand.

The missing theory of change

Procurement without a theory of change becomes extractive. In the absence of clear intent, public spending will always drift towards the path of least resistance. The same suppliers. The same beneficial loyalists. The same relationships. The same concentration of opportunity and resource capture. A few actors do very well, while the broader economy remains structurally unchanged.

A serious government must decide, upfront, what outcomes it is pursuing through procurement – and in operational terms rather than rhetoric or slogans.

At its simplest, the strategic logic should look like this:

• Desired outcomes: resilience, wider wealth circulation, and the scaling of domestic enterprise.

• Strategic actions: competitive tendering, supplier diversity, and clear limits on discretionary awards, enforced rather than merely encouraged.

• Measurement: shifting the focus from “Was the money spent?” to “What did this spending actually produce?”

Without this logic, procurement becomes a mechanism that inadvertently or deliberately makes a few people wealthy.

Now let’s talk about expediency versus strategy. The current standoff with the Auditor General’s Department and Government’s defence of the Starlink purchase has been framed around urgency. Yes, speed saves lives. However, speed and discipline are not opposites. In moments of crisis, urgency does not invalidate structure. It is the most robust test that structure must face.

Best practices show that top-down ministerial interventions that sideline the very safeguards designed to protect merit, transparency, and value will compromise the system. When growth is intentional, even emergency procurement strengthens systems, not weaken them.

Measuring what actually matters

If we accept the ideology that procurement is a confession of intent, then the only way to know whether growth is intentional or accidental is to measure the right things. This is not raw capture of vanity metrics, like total spend. This is about outcomes. A government that is serious about leveraging procurement as a development tool should track, at minimum, six indicators.

1. MSME Spend Density

What percentage of national procurement is awarded to local small and medium sized enterprises versus large or multinational firms? This shows whether public money is circulating domestically or leaking outward.

2. Bid to Win Ratio for New Entrants

How often do first-time bidders actually win contracts? A low ratio signals a closed shop. A healthy ratio suggests a system where merit outweighs familiarity.

3. Competitive versus Direct Award Ratio

How much procurement value is awarded through open competition versus direct or emergency contracting? This is the real transparency test.

4. Procurement Cycle Time

How long does it take from tender publication to award, and from award to first payment? Slow bureaucracy is a hidden tax that only well capitalised firms can afford.

5. Geographic Disbursement

Where does procurement spend actually land? If contracts are consistently concentrated in particular geographies, then procurement is reinforcing imbalance rather than correcting it.

6. Social Return on Investment

Perhaps most important is what additional social value major contracts create. Emphasis on major contracts. Apprenticeships, local hiring, and skills transfer must be built into procurement by design.

The Jamaican Government holds one of the most powerful instruments of change in its hands: its own purse strings. A strategic procurement framework treats contracting as a deliberate stitch in the fabric of national development; disciplined, equitable, transparent, predictable, and resistant to capture.

One love.

Yaneek Page is the programme lead for Market Entry USA and a certified trainer in entrepreneurship.