The Government and its surrogates are now attempting to rewrite the facts surrounding the unspent hurricane relief funds identified in the recent report by the Auditor General’s Department. Their latest talking point is that the funds remained unused because they were trapped in bureaucratic red tape and that the establishment of the National Reconstruction and Relief Authority (NaRRA) would somehow have solved the problem.

That argument collapses under the weight of the Auditor General’s own findings.

The report makes clear that the issue was not procedural delay, but a shocking absence of planning and execution. In the case of Hurricane Beryl, there were no expenditure plans attached to significant portions of the funds collected. None. One cannot blame “red tape” when there were no actual projects or spending frameworks prepared in the first place.

The findings regarding Tropical Storm Melissa are even more alarming. According to the audit, 88 per cent of the funds collected had not been committed to any project at the time the audit was conducted. Again, this was not because applications were stuck in some administrative maze or because ministries were waiting on approvals. The money simply had not been assigned to meaningful recovery work.

That is not a governance bottleneck. It is incompetence.

The Government is now trying to present NaRRA as a magic institutional fix that would automatically convert collected money into an effective disaster response. But no authority, agency or law can compensate for poor planning, lack of urgency, weak coordination and apparent indifference to victims awaiting assistance.

A competent administration does not wait months after a disaster to decide how relief funds should be used. A competent administration does not collect money in the name of suffering citizens while failing to establish clear expenditure programmes. Most importantly, a competent administration does not seek to shift blame onto systems and procedures when the real problem lies in the absence of leadership and execution.

The Jamaican people are not foolish. Citizens contributed and sacrificed with the expectation that relief funds would reach affected communities quickly and transparently. They deserve honesty, not spin.

If NaRRA is to have any value at all, it must begin with accountability and competence. Without those two elements, it will simply become another institution used to excuse failure rather than deliver results.

Denton Smith can be contacted at : [email protected]