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Senator Aubyn Hill addressed the Senate with his State of the Nation Debate speech entitled “Building Back Stronger”.The main theme was spurring the Jamaican economy during and after the ravishes of the COVID pandemic. He spoke of the resilience and growth of the BPO sector.

He also spoke on the vexing issue of water supply and management, pointing out the billions of dollars lost by the National Water Commission. He also stressed the importance of getting land titles into Jamaican hands. 

Read his full address below:

“Mr President, it is with great pleasure that I rise again in this noble Senate to present another State of the Nation address. This time I rise not only as a Senator but also as a Minister of Cabinet and for those two privileges – being a Senator and a Minister of Government, I am particularly grateful to Prime Minister Andrew Holness, for granting me these distinct privileges to serve Jamaica and him.

You know, Mr President, sitting in Cabinet has enhanced my perspective and provided me with a closeness to discussions which allows me a much clearer insight as to what happens at the highest policymaking level in the country. It also gives me a clear view of how some of our leading personalities operate. And here I want to comment on a statement that the Prime Minister’s detractors like to make, that he seeks to behave in a dictatorial manner.

Mr President, nothing could be further from the truth! I sit in Cabinet and watch the Prime Minister allow every kind of opinion to be placed on the table. He avoids no one and therefore allows all opinions to be heard. Prime Minister Holness’ patience is admirable and inspiring, and his ability to accommodate sharply divergent views makes him an exemplary democratic leader.

Mr President, Cabinet meets from 10:00 am till well past 10:00 pm sometimes and that is because Prime Minister Andrew Holness allows everyone to have his and her say, and then he sets about crafting a set of consensuses which is then taken to the people via parliament the very next day. There could be no greater democratic exercise than the one which Andrew Holness conducts at his weekly Cabinet meetings. Again, Mr President, I am indeed privileged to serve this very democratic Prime Minister as a member of his Cabinet.

I must also thank my small number of staff members and advisers at the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation. A great big thank you must go to our Permanent Secretary Audrey Sewell, who has been gracious and patient in helping me get established in the ministry, and she has guided me around the corridors of government, using and sharing her wealth of experience. My advisers and consultants, and my executive assistant, Kadian Jonas, have all been extremely capable and hard-working and you will hear more of them later this year as we seek to craft legislation to bring to parliament.

Resilience, strength and growth – Global Services sector, BPO

Almost everything changed for the worse during the COVID-19 pandemic which arrived in Jamaica in March 2020, Mr President.

Health, schooling and education, entertainment, employment – real growth in UNEMPLOYMENT, how people work – mainly a lot from home, travel and tourism, and how we socialize with our family members and friends all took a very negative downturn since March 2020.

Mr President, I am really pleased to report that there is one business sector in Jamaica that stood out during this period for its resilience, strength and growth. It is the BPO sector, which is part of the Global Services Association of Jamaica.

There are others like the construction and service delivery sectors that also showed buoyancy but my focus just now, Mr President, is just how exceptionally well the Business Process Industry performed over the very difficult last year-and-half!

My colleague, Senator Don Wehby, who opened this year’s State of the Nation Debate last month, spoke about the work JAMPRO is doing with the Global Services Association of Jamaica – especially training young people to meet the demand of members of the Global Services Association of Jamaica.

Today, Mr President, I want to tell this noble Senate and the nation how resilient and strong the Business Process Industry has been during this recent most difficult period.

• As of June 30, 2021, the BPO sector employed 44,000 people compared to 38,400 for a similar period in 2020. That’s approximately 15 per cent increase in jobs – year over year – when the economy was shrinking by over 10 per cent during the same period! Jamaicans, We are building back stronger.
• Mr President, I am extremely pleased to tell Jamaicans that in the year to June 30, 2021, the BPO Services sector brought in US$780 million to the economy.
• There are 87 operators in the sector, Mr President, both domestic and international, occupying 105 sites across Jamaica. Ten of these operators are Fortune500 companies. We want to say it loud and say it clear that this Andrew Holness administration truly appreciates the commitment of cash, management and energy these investors have made to Jamaica and the thousands of jobs these investors have provided for so many grateful Jamaicans. This ministry will continue to do everything in our power and within the law to provide the support and ease-of-operation these investors need to run their businesses.
• The markets which the companies in the Global Services Association of Jamaica serve include Canada, the wider Caribbean, China, the USA, Europe and the Philippines.
• Growth plans for this sector include nine new sites across Jamaica by existing players, which means organic growth, Mr President, and there is a new investor who is about to establish a 70-seat facility in Montego Bay.

Making work-at-home work better

The unannounced and sudden arrival of the deadly pandemic in the first quarter of 2020 forced immediate and radical changes on many of our activities – including the operations of the Business Processing Industry in Jamaica. The relatively early spike, in a BPO operation, of COVID-19 soon after the virus arrived in Jamaica, spurred all the stakeholders – including the government – to adjust and change behaviour.

• A major and swift response to the early spike was to agree to a set of protocols to allow Jamaicans to do their BPO work from home. Equally urgent and important was the need for the government to allow BPO businesses to move their laptops and similar computing equipment to their employees’ homes – without paying duty and related fees which were avoided when the government gave them permission to put these equipment in their normal and registered places of business.
• The work from home experiment started in early 2020 and as soon as I was appointed to the Cabinet and in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation in September, I quickly got involved in getting an additional six-month extension for the Work-At-Home (WAH) policy in December 2020. Here I must compliment Minister of Finance, Dr Nigel Clarke, for working with the Global Services Association of Jamaica and myself to get these extensions in place – often just before the expiry date of the current approvals.
• I have been negotiating with the Ministry of Finance since that time and just before the end of June and the last six-month extension, Dr. Clarke and his team at the Ministry of Finance agreed to a longer one-year extension of the Work-At-Home policy.
• This longer extension allows investors and operators more planning and operating time, something for which the operators had been pressing. Compliments must also go to Gloria Henry, who runs the Global Services Association of Jamaica and has been a relentless prodder and pusher through her many personal interventions with me and others to get the longer period approved.

GSAJ and JSEZA

The pandemic has caused us to make a close review of the activities in Jamaica’s Global Services business, and especially in the BPO sector of that association. In the process, we have decided to look at how best to make work-at-home operate more smoothly, efficiently and mutually beneficial for all stakeholders. In that review, we have noticed that the working arrangement between the Jamaica Special Economic Zone Authority (JSEZA) and the Global Services Association of Jamaica’s members and operators is less than efficient, and needs a thorough reworking.

Many operators in the Global Services Sector find the JSEZA to be overly bureaucratic, often inefficient and that it takes too long to get responses and decisions. For instance, operators say it takes up to eight days to get approval to move equipment from sites to work-at-home facilities. JSEZA quarterly reports often ask for information that is not regularly tracked. The operators want us to look at giving them their own legislative arrangements, possibly separate and apart from being under the JSEZA.

The new chairman of the JSEZ board, Chris Levy fully understands this Government’s commitment to make the necessary changes and he and his experienced board will be given the authority and responsibility to do what is best for JSEZA, the entities and people it serves, and Jamaica.

Clearly, Mr President, as Prime Minister Holness has been saying, we want our colleagues in government to move swiftly up the service mindset and efficiency ladder, even as they keep to accounting accuracy, transparency and integrity guidelines.

Mr President, we are reviewing these requests and comments and more will be said on this issue in the near future. We at the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation want to make it clear the importance we place on this growing sector in our economy. We want to take all the necessary steps to make sure the BPO and other sectors within the Global Services Association of Jamaica have every operational incentive and ease, within our laws and regulations to grow and prosper for all our mutual benefit.

Water, an integral factor in ‘Building back stronger’

Mr President, it’s a firm truism that ‘No one says anything about water until they do not have it!’ That is a nice way for saying you will get no compliments for running water in a person’s pipes day-after-day, night-after-night, month-after-month, but God helps the provider when water supply stops due to a broken or leaking pipe, or a scheduled cut off!

While the constant public focus is always on potable water supplies to our domestic and commercial entities, 70 per cent of the water that is managed in Jamaica goes for irrigation. There is good news on the irrigation front, Mr President.

About three years ago while I was the chairman of the National Irrigation Commission (NIC), I started a set of discussions with the then French Ambassador Jean Michel Despax, who arranged for the French government’s economic development arm to provide financial support to undertake a study of possibly irrigating the South Saint Elizabeth area, using the surface water of the Black River system. The location is fortuitous, in that it combines the waters of the Black River basin – the largest river in Jamaica – with the very productive but often dry southern plains of Saint Elizabeth which is contiguous to the river basin.

Minister Floyd Green has kindly agreed to have me continue to collaborate with his ministry and the NIC on the project – especially as we move into the financing phase.

When the project is completed, it will provide expanding irrigation services to at least 4,000 farmers on 4,103 hectares (10,138.73 acres) of land, serving several communities in the breadbasket parish of St Elizabeth including Newell, Flagaman, Potsdam, Top Hill and the Southfield areas.

Mr President, at the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation new, sustainable jobs are important to us, as they are to each Jamaican; this investment will produce new and sustainable jobs.

Both the feasibility assessment and preliminary engineering designs were completed in 2019 by the French firm utilising a FASEP grant valued at €692,540. The feasibility assessment indicates that the project enjoys 97 per cent support from the local farmers.

The conclusion from the feasibility assessment is that the Pedro Plains project is a worthwhile development objective that will bring significant benefits to both the local economy and the country in keeping with the Vision 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The investment cost for the project is estimated at US$191 million with an economic internal rate of return (EIRR) ranging between 20-22 per cent. The net present value was calculated at US$750M cumulative over a 30- year period.

The National Irrigation Commission is obliged to secure an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report as a pre-project requirement of NEPA, and the NIC sought a US$40,000 grant from the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service to fund the EIA study.

This is essentially a climate change mitigation project that will use renewable solar energy to pump water from the plains of the Black River basin, up to the Munro College area and gravity feed the water back down to the farming areas that were mentioned above. Given the impact on the environment and the prospective positive effect on climate change that this project will have, the French government has already indicated its willingness to provide longer-term and cost-efficient financing along with participation by the Government of Jamaica and local financial institutions.

The Ministry of Finance and the Public Service sees this as a very worthwhile investment, that will enhance significantly a major economic growth area among a set of Jamaicans that are known to be high-producing and productive farmers. The ministry has approved the US$40,000 that the NIC has requested.

The hard realities and opportunities that exist at the NWC

• In the last 15 years, the National Water Commission (NWC) has made a net loss every year. Some accountants may challenge me on the profit figure for 2013 because there was a $1.15 billion “profit” for the year. That was no cash that anyone could spend – just an accounting technicality resulting from the treatment of a timing difference related to deferred taxes.
• The total accumulated loss for the 15 years since 2006 is $42,908,370,000!
• In 2019, the NWC made a huge loss of $4,520,272,777.00 while in 2020 the National Water Commission recorded a further whopping loss of $5,665,737,897.00.
• Mr President, what those losses mean is that in 2019 Jamaican taxpayers, many poor taxpayers, had to pump in over $4.5 billion into what is like a sinkhole for money at the NWC, and those same poor Jamaican taxpayers had to inject an even larger amount of $5.7 billion into the commission in 2020!
• The Independent Auditors’ Report for March 2021 disclosed that the NWC had an accumulated deficit of $42,908,370,000 at the end of their 2020 financial year, and at the end of 2019 that figure was $34,633,056,000, the accumulated deficit keeps growing.
• The bottom-line of all this perennial loss-making water and sewage delivery service carried on by the National Water Commission is that it has a huge negative net worth of $12.62B as of March 31, 2021. Its equity is completely wiped out, Mr President.
• Mr President, the hard truth is the NWC makes only losses in the business, losses that have to be financed by many poor Jamaicans every year. The hard truth is that NWC does not have anything near the amount of money it needs to deliver the water and services Jamaicans need and expect.

• And the GOJ does not have the cash or the fiscal space to take on the debt to give NWC the money it needs to spend.
• External auditors rendered the following opinion on the National Water Commission: “These conditions indicate the existence of a material uncertainty that may cast doubt about the Commission’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
• Mr. President, I make the case, and many Jamaicans understand the dark and stark reality, that this perennial loss-making activity at the NWC is simply NOT SUSTAINABLE!
• But water is life…so what do we do? Although the NWC does not have the full and very substantial amount of cash it needs to operate efficiently and to meet the growing expectations of the citizens that it serves, we at the NWC still spend a lot of money to keep supplying water to Jamaicans, and to keep thousands of Jamaicans in decent paying jobs.

Here is a small sample of the $7.5B funding schedule for FY2021/22 and the projects on which the NWC money was spent:

1. Greater Mandeville water supply improvement project =$500M
2. Essex Valley buildings in Nain, St Elizabeth (£59M grant from the UK) = $100M
3. Spanish Town Road – Six Miles to Glenmore Road Transmission Main = $3.5B
4. Spanish Town Road Transmission Pipeline – KSA = 1.5B
5. Port Royal Transmission Main Replacement, Kingston = $300M
6. Islandwide Pump Replacement = $300M
7. Martha Brae, Trelawny, Water Treatment Plant Intake Upgrading = $30M.
8. Hounslow-Parotee Supply and Installation of 8Km of 150mm pipes budgeted this year for $125M.

Fixing NWC

So, Mr President, since NWC needs a lot of outside money to fix it what will we do?

Almost three years ago, the commission contracted with Castalia, an international consulting firm that has a strong reputation for addressing water issues, to conduct a comprehensive study with the aim of recommending a comprehensive transformation of the National Water Commission.

Castalia looked at the need for the NWC to be re-capitalized, the prospect of bringing in new private corporate and individual investors after corporatizing NWC, then privatizing and placing it on the Jamaica Stock Exchange. The consultants arrived at three main conclusions:

1. The National Water Commission needs a new business model.
2. Tariffs to consumers are reaching unaffordable levels – so we need much more efficiency and new equipment.
3. NWC’s capital expenditure cannot be financed under the current business model.

After a very detailed and comprehensive exploration of the conclusions, Castalia arrived at four main recommendations.

1. The government needs to agree that the NWC will be transformed into a limited liability company with shares.
2. The government needs to agree that the water sector legislation and regulation should be modernised by passing a new Water Act which, among other things, removes statutory powers from NWC and transfers them to other appropriate bodies, and provides for the corporatisation of the service provision functions of NWC.
3. That GOJ needs to direct officials to ensure affordability and access to water for poor families and communities, consistent with the new water policy.
4. The government will need to mandate the rapid implementation of these decisions by appointing an Enterprise Team to lead the transactions to transform the NWC. The DBJ will be the secretariat for the Enterprise Team.

Mr. President, Prime Minister Andrew Holness, has agreed to the members of the prospective enterprise team and the process of appointment is moving through the Ministry of Finance and the Attorney General’s Chambers in the draft cabinet submission.

Mr President, the Andrew Holness administration will make necessary transformations, including difficult and complex ones such as this will be, in order to… Build Back Stronger!

Renewable water

Mr President, at a time when climate change is such a prominent part of the international conversation, an island nation such as Jamaica has to apply its thinking and some of its resources to the matter of renewable water. In spite of being the land of ‘wood and water’, we often suffer severe droughts and many of our citizens are inconvenienced due to the shortage from lock-offs of water.

Mr President, for NWC to get water to the last village and last home in various rural places in Jamaica, often up steep hills, is a very expensive exercise. It is expensive to add lift stations and water treatment systems that are simply not economical. The cost to supply water to those distant communities and distribution points invariably prove to be prohibitive.

The Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation has purposed to find a different and better way to serve these communities and isolated villages and homes, Mr President.

Rainwater harvesting is the method we have decided on – not only for distant villages. It is an alternative source of water that should be considered across the country and especially for new homes and other new buildings. It’s a fact only 15 per cent of Jamaican households use rainwater harvesting and 31% of those rainwater harvesters are in non-utility areas – usually rural places.

Indeed, Mr President, those of us from South St. Elizabeth grew up on rainwater harvesting, with water flowing from well-guttered rooftops to well-built large catchment tanks in our homes.

To this end, Mr President, the ministry has formed a working group to look at all aspects of rainwater harvesting. Because water is a very heavy substance and costly to distribute, especially uphill, we have to also look at the related energy cost to make this transition to a country-wide rainwater harvesting system possible.

It is a very potent fact that 30 per cent of NWC’s operating cost is simply for the purchase of JPS’ energy, which is produced by fossil fuels, some of which are quite detrimental for the climate, our tourist island and to individuals. So, a big part of those big annual losses is incurred to pay JPS!

And to make matters worse, JPS has been in the business of charging NWC interest at 17 per cent, per annum on delayed payments. Mr President, a car loan during this period to an unincorporated individual would carry an interest rate in the vicinity of six or seven per cent, but JPS would charge a wholly-owned Government of Jamaica enterprise such as NWC 17 per cent interest per annum.

Well, the size of the energy requirement and the cost of funding to support the required energy forced us to look at cleaner, renewable alternatives to twin with the renewable water project.

As we seek to Build Back Stronger, we need to create new and well-paying jobs. By making the wide use of renewable water twined with renewable energy a sustainable and perennial social, engineering and financial reality, we will be creating and providing those very needed new jobs for our Jamaican brothers and sisters.

We have had preliminary discussions with the Ministry of Energy Science and Technology as we look at different aspects of the project. We are in the early stages, Mr President, but we are crafting a plan that would ensure that the government does not spend any money on infrastructure or the financing of any part of this project and that the private sector will be very much involved. Some of those discussions with the private sector have started already.

An important financial component is that payments for the renewable systems by new homeowners will be stretched over a long period of time. This will enable young homeowners to afford to equip their homes with renewable water and renewable energy systems that will pay for themselves from savings from very expensive energy produced by climate-contaminating fossil fuels, well before their longer-term payment periods expire.

Mr President, we will not be able to avoid fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, however, we as policy makers must devise sensible and economically viable policies to reduce our carbon footprint by creating new, well-paying and sustainable jobs. Our policy-legislation project on Renewable Water twined with Renewable Energy is such an effort.

Getting titles to Jamaicans through the NLA

Mr President, we have a large set of untitled land in this country which is a drag on our economic growth and the employment of the Jamaican people. Apart from government-owned lands, there are tens of thousands of Jamaicans who have rights in various properties across the country but have no legal documentation in the form of a title to prove their ownership.

In our drive to Build Back Stronger, Mr President, the issuing of titles to ordinary Jamaicans is a key objective of the Andrew Holness administration working through the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation and the National Land Agency.

But a funny thing happened on the way to issuing many more new titles, Mr President!

The PM had announced near the end of his last administration that he wants to issue 30,000 titles in five years. When I took over the responsibility for the NLA in October last year, I met with the senior executives at the Agency and look at how best we could achieve this goal.

I asked the NLA for a projection of how they plan to issue these new titles and to my surprise, I got a list that said that in the year 2020-21, 2,200 titles would be issued, in the second year 2021- 22 13,000 would be completed and in the third year 14,000 would be issued. That’s after I made it clear that the 30,000 had to be issued in three years rather than five years.

I also looked at what they were issuing annually and realized that if the Prime Minister’s target was to be met the number of new titles that we issue would have to be significantly enhanced and frontloaded. Those projections were given after we passed the Systematic Titling bill in this Senate in June last year. Clearly, Mr President, giving us 2,200 in the lead year and 14,000 at the backend would not work.

Working with the new acting CEO of the NLA, Cheriese Walcott, and her team we have arrived at an agreement that the NLA will produce at least 10,000 titles in the first year to individual Jamaicans and businesses – in addition to those which the agency normally does for the government.

Apart from getting the Systematic Titling procedure up and running well, and it is being done in various parishes at this time, Mr. President, a new arrangement was put in place for those who would opt to get their titles on a voluntary basis, or when there are valid disputes in the systematic titling process that require adjudication.

Instead of the one adjudication body – known as The Referees – resident in Kingston, the new systematic titling bill made arrangements for various adjudication bodies to be established across the country to offer an alternative to the single set of Referees in Kingston.

Today, we have 40 such Adjudication Bodies across the country, properly staffed with lawyers, surveyors and people from the local communities, and the process is working well.

In fact, Mr President, it is working so well that in a recent community where 1,000 systematic titles are being issued, there was only one contended transaction that had to go to adjudication and it was settled within a week, much quicker than using the single body of referee in distant Kingston.

Mr. President, Jamaican people need titles for their land in order to convert these very valuable but non-income-producing assets into income producing properties through lease, mortgage or sale. Getting them titles will help to Build Back Stronger!

Electronic titling

Mr President, land registration in Jamaica is based on the Torrens system of conveyancing and is currently a paper-based registration system. Other jurisdictions have successfully transitioned to a modern electronic registration system, which has significantly reduced processing time, and hassle, in obtaining and updating title information. Jamaica wishes to move to an electronic platform in keeping with global best practices.

This is a quite complex transformation, Mr President, but the NLA has started on an approximately five-year journey. The Ministry of Finance and the Public Service has given its approval to provide the funding. The Foundations for Competitiveness and Growth Project of the World Bank has also committed to providing partial funding for the project.

The NLA has developed a business case for the implementation of electronic titles and a consultant has been engaged to evaluate the providers of the service to install the equipment, software and commissioning. In three months, the selection of the winner from the shortlist of three companies will be chosen.

The contract should be awarded next summer, and it will then take about two years to get the pilot ready for testing and rolling out of the full program.

As the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation seeks to Build Back Stronger, we are ensuring that Jamaicans will get their titles much more easily under the Systematic Titling Act, and in addition, we will digitise the processing and delivery of titles through the proposed Electronic Titling system which is being worked on even as we speak.

Mr President, getting titles completed swiftly, accurately and digitally is part of building efficiency into our very paper-based bureaucracy, and this kind of efficiency that we are seeking to implement is part of building back stronger!

Conclusion

Mr President, the Andrew Holness administration has come through, very credibly, the most stringent social, economic, health, entertainment and every kind of test that the COVID-pandemic has brought. We have educated our people to sanitise, practice physical but not necessarily social distancing, take their Covid test if they feel unwell, self-quarantine when is necessary, and we have even provided new facilities in record time to make more beds available to people who caught the virus.

Given our fairly limited resources, Mr President, and the near total unavailability of vaccines because richer nations sought to take care of their own and in the process resorted to hoarding vaccines; in spite of all these difficulties and challenges, the government led by Prime Minister Andrew Holness has guided the country well through this valley of COVID 19 and it’s companion set of significant difficulties. And it’s not over yet.

As I did at the beginning, I again ask Jamaicans to take the vaccine when their turn comes around.

So, Mr President, the Business Processing Outsourcing sector within the Global Services Association of Jamaica has performed extremely well in a difficult pandemic-impaired year-and-half. The business operators in the BPO sector, the Jamaican workers working for these businesses, the provisions for the work-at-home pivot by the government have all contributed to us building back stronger!

The Urban Development Corporation (UDC) in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation completed Harmony Beach and had a wonderful opening with PM Holness doing the honours, which everybody seemed to have enjoyed and which brought Jamaica extremely good publicity.

Jamaica’s Tourism Minister and the tourism sector have taken a leading role in charting a way back from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, I travelled to Spain and Saudi Arabia with Minister Bartlett as he carried the tourism recovery discussion, I accompanied him to encourage and offer guidance to investors to invest in Jamaica – both in tourism and in other sectors of the economy.

We in Jamaica all sort of know this and take it for granted, but, Mr President, I can confirm that our tourism minister, Edmund Bartlett, is a bona fide accepted superstar in the tourism industry around the world. I witnessed it clearly in Europe and the Middle East.

Our tourism industry is building back stronger. It is bringing in new hotel rooms, and while in Spain we met with the owners of various hotels here in Jamaica, and they were very interested in their industry forging linkages to enable the economic benefit, which their investments bring, to be felt more directly by many more Jamaicans.

Mr President, on the vital and emotive issue of water, the Andrew Holness administration is building a 15,000,000 gallon water per day facility on the Rio Cobre River and the financial arrangements are far advanced, subsequent to the Cabinet’s approval of the US$60 million project.

The British have helped us tremendously in developing the water resources in the south-eastern part of Saint Elizabeth, with their £59,000,000 Grant. We are working with the French Government on developing a brand new irrigation system for the south central part of Saint Elizabeth to be watered by the surface water of the Black River and powered by renewable solar energy which is plentiful on the plains of Saint Elizabeth.

Given the US$3.5 billion which the NWC is estimated to need to make itself efficient and capable of meeting the water services needs of Jamaicans, the government is exploring the possibility of corporatising and privatising the commission.

These complex commercial exercises are needed to get injections of equity in sufficient amounts from both the Jamaican private sector and individuals, and from prospective foreign investors with deep pockets and clear management skills.

We need to make what we now know as the NWC into a new company that is fit for the purpose of providing potable water, and wastewater services, across the length and breadth of the country.

We have no choice, Mr President, building back stronger will mean fixing NWC. It will be a long, complex and very likely arduous process, but fixing NWC has to be done.

We need a reliable, sustainable, efficient and economically viable replacement for the current perennially huge loss-making NWC!

Mr President, the National Land Agency (NLA) plays a vital part in the economic empowerment of so many ordinary Jamaicans. For too long we have been satisfied to deliver a couple of thousand titles per year, considering that we have hundreds of thousands of parcels of land that are untitled.

Mr President, giving a sharper new focus to the NLA under new management in order to get many more valuable land titles in the hands of Jamaicans is also building back stronger!

Mr President, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our country in almost every possible negative way, it is extremely challenging – stretching us to our limits. COVID 19 is long-lasting and, quite frankly, Mr President, just terrible for our people and our country.

But Mr. President, we are Jamaicans, and we never give up! We fight for success even when only the will to win is left in us, we are Jamaicans!

Mr President, no matter what the COVID-19 pandemic might do, we are Jamaicans and we shall sing! We sing through all the circumstances and for decades, Mr President, until the whole world has no choice but to declare that THE song of our preeminent singer, Bob Marley, is the best song of the last century! None other could match One Love. I hear it in scores of countries around the world, Mr President, and we as Jamaicans will continue to sing through the pandemic…and WIN.

Mr President, we toil and train and compete until we win, and we win in MANY of the Olympics since those early days in Helsinki, and we kept competing and shining until TODAY, this wonderful country of ours, Jamaica, is home to the fastest woman and fastest man living on the planet.

Luckily for Jamaica at this time, Mr President, we have a Prime Minister in Andrew Holness who is a clear winner! No question whatsoever about THAT! Prime Minister Holness and his Cabinet of Ministers have given this country wise, balanced, unconfrontational and forward-looking leadership, based on good knowledge and data, and so, Mr President, in the face of this terrible pandemic, Jamaica is Building Back Stronger, and we shall overcome this pandemic, too, and we will WIN, Mr President.