The Government needs to attract and retain the very best procurement professionals. While Prime Minister Andrew Holness has pointed to contractors’ inefficiencies, experts argue that the deeper issue lies within the public sector’s limited capacity to manage billions in projects. Building a cadre of highly trained, accredited, and well-compensated specialists is seen as critical to ensuring that taxpayer funds are spent effectively and national growth targets are met.

Need: procurement specialists

Jamaica Gleaner/13 Oct 2025

WHEN HE responded last week to the Independent Fiscal Commission’s (IFC) warning that the government’s ongoing inability to meet its capital spending targets could weaken Jamaica’s growth prospects, Prime Minister Andrew Holness focused primarily on contractors who fail to deliver projects on time.

“There are many issues that would cause the underutilisation of the capital budget,” Dr Holness said, “But, the one that is of interest to us is how contractors execute projects and the speed in which they execute projects … If they don’t perform, the budget cannot be expended and the growth of the country is slow.”

His Ministry of Economic Growth and Infrastructure Development (it was until recently growth and job creation) was addressing the problem by developing a programme to help domestic contractors build capacity, the prime minister said.

Dr Holness is no doubt right about the shortcomings of contractors, and how their weaknesses contribute to the slow execution of projects. But, as he intimated, this isn’t the whole story. It is questionable that it is even the major one.

There are great shortcomings, too, in the government’s procurement architecture. This is not only in oversight rigidities, against which public officials often complain, and some of which the government sought to remedy with recent amendments to the Public Procurement Act.

But a larger, and more pressing issue, as this newspaper has raised before, is the numbers, and quality of the personnel, who are asked to annually manage and monitor scores of billions of dollars of procurement, utilising various bidding/sourcing regimes and contracting schemes.

PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE

This requires – or ought to – the highest level professional competence, and sufficient staff, so that it is done with the highest level of professionalism, and in a timely manner, to protect taxpayers’ interest and deliver on national priorities. In other words, the expertise required by public servants to manage bids to spend huge amounts of money should be no less than would be expected in the private sector.

The anecdotal evidence suggests that despite improvements in recent times, significant deficits remain.

The IFC, which became operational in January, reviews, and reports on, the government’s fiscal operations, to determine whether it is on track to lower, and maintain, Jamaica’s debt to no more than 60 per cent GDP, as set out in law. That target is likely to be met by the end of the current fiscal year, two years ahead of schedule.

In its review for the first quarter (April to June) of the 2025/2026 fiscal year, the commission repeated a concern it raised in January in its report for the third quarter of the 2024/25 fiscal year: of under-spending on capital projects and the potential consequences thereof.

The IFC noted that in the 2024/25 fiscal year, selffinancing public bodies (some of which oversee major public sector infrastructure/development projects, generated an overall surplus of $88.9 billion, or 2.5 per cent of GDP. This was 158.4 per cent ($34.4) billion above the original target. The much larger surplus was mainly the result of these bodies underspending on capital projects by $49.1 billion.

SLOW EXECUTION

The slow execution of capital projects continued in the new fiscal year, lagging across central government and public bodies between April and June by $20.4 billion, a shortfall of 50.37 per cent on the projected spend.

Given this “underwhelming” pace of execution, and the evidence of previous years, it seems unlikely that the total capital budget of $163.8 billion will be spent by the end of next March.

“The IFC notes that the underspending does not represent true savings, but rather a delay or slowness in the pace of execution of projects and programmes,” the agency said. “This is of considerable concern particularly with regard to capital projects amid the adverse implications for economic growth.”

While contractor inefficiencies contribute to the failures, a significant constraint is the slow pace at which projects get off the ground, from conceptualisation to procurement. That, in part, is the outcome of layers of bureaucracy, which have grown to close loopholes which were exploited by corrupt officials.

The Gleaner supports recent moves to rid the system of some of the in-built inertia – but not at the expense of accountability and protection of taxpayers’ resources.

Among the answers to such legitimate concerns, as we suggested nearly a year and a half ago, is the development of a cadre of highly trained, certified, accredited and decently paid procurement professionals.

In other words, the government should attract the best talent to what should be seen as a prized, specialist profession. Clear career paths should be developed in the public sector for this group.

This means that the government must cooperate with universities and other institutions on specialised training, as well as continuing education programmes for procurement specialists.

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