Editorial | House oversight of the NRRA

An important development which escaped significant attention last week was the disclosure by Information Minister Dana Morris Dixon that the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NRRA) is now in operation and would soon begin advertising for staff.

According to Dr Morris Dixon, the agency is “operating as a department of the Cabinet and the Cabinet has oversight”.

What the minister didn’t explain in her remarks at Wednesday’s briefing after last Monday’s weekly meeting of ministers (Cabinet), was whether the NRRA would be anchored in legislation, as this newspaper proposed and Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness appeared to concede in November when he announced his plan to establish the authority.

Dr Holness must urgently clarify this question, certainly no later than at tomorrow’s session of Parliament when he should table, or have tabled, a green paper on the proposed structure of the organisation.

And, if it is indeed the administration’s intention that the NRRA will be a statutory authority, the bill for its establishment mustn’t, as is too often the case in these matters, be rushed through Parliament without giving stakeholders a real opportunity to read the fine print, or to make meaningful inputs into the law’s formulation.

There are good reasons for this, but none better than the vast amount of resources that are likely to be at the NRRA’s disposal and the significant powers it will be afforded to do things. Taxpayers, in the circumstances, should be assured of its credible and transparent oversight. Put another way, the bosses of NRRA, notwithstanding whatever advisory board might be in place, should have to periodically (say quarterly) report to Parliament via a special committee chaired by a member of the Opposition.

It has been widely accepted that the resilient rebuilding of western Jamaica from the over US$8.6 billion worth of destruction left by Hurricane Melissa can’t be accomplished – at least not in a reasonable time frame, or efficiently – within Jamaica’s normal budgetary or bureaucratic framework.

INSTITUTIONAL CAPACITY

Even in the best of times, the Jamaican State hardly possessed the institutional capacity or operational flexibility to undertake a project of the size and complexity of the post-Hurricane Melissa reconstruction, which will require the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars annually over three to five years. And that capacity has been hollowed out in recent decades as the State was forced into retreat.

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

He indicated that the authority will be given significant authority to cut through red tape and to bring cohesion to the myriad projects that will be part of the rebuilding exercise.

Reconstruction super-agencies, such as is proposed for Jamaica, are not uncommon in rebuilding efforts after countries suffer major catastrophes.

It was, for instance, the approach adopted by the US State of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina’s major destruction of swathes of New Orleans in 2005. The model was also employed in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that hit the country’s northwestern coastal region. A similar arrangement was used by New Zealand with its establishment of the Canterbury Earthquake Authority Recovery Authority (CERA) after the 2011 Canterbury earthquake.

PREFERENCE

However, given Jamaica’s long-standing weaknesses in governance, citizens’ high perception of corruption in public institutions and of officials, and the low level of trust in the society, The Gleaner’s preference, as it previously suggested, is for a rebuilding mechanism modelled on Louisiana: it was codified in law; had a board of governors from both parties and other stakeholders; it also had oversight from the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget.

After Prime Minister Holness’ remarks about a specific vehicle to be called the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority, this newspaper, like many other people, was left with the distinct impression that the NRRA would be a creature of statute – as is the case with similar bodies and state corporations.

Although the prime minister promised that the NRRA would benefit from oversight by a “multi-stakeholder board that (will ensure) we are making the right decisions, that there is transparency and accountability”, Parliament, this newspaper holds, must be the ultimate guarantor of its fair and transparent performance on behalf of Jamaicans.

Information Minister Morris Dixon reported that the Cabinet had “conversations around an advisory board for NRRA” and that “individuals will be placed on it with the requisite expertise”.

She also indicated that the ministers’ conversations included an oversight role of sorts for the National Partnership Council (NPC) – a largely perfunctory closed body of administration, opposition, private sector and civil society representatives – where government policies are discussed and consensus is supposed to be arrived at. But there was no precision of what that would be, or how it would work.

These ideas perhaps have value, if people are clear on what they are. Which is why that government must bring clarity to them.

However, nothing that is done should be at the expense of parliamentary oversight.