JAMAICA | PNP's Golding and Tomlinson Unite: NaRRA Bill a Power Grab Dressed as Reconstruction

Opposition Leader Mark Golding and PNP Senator Cleveland Tomlinson are sounding the same alarm from different corners of the parliamentary chamber: the NaRRA Bill as drafted would hand a single authority billions in reconstruction funds with no board, no internal auditor, no risk management — and oversight arrangements that exist only on paper.

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Two of Jamaica’s most prominent parliamentary voices have converged on a single, damning conclusion about the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) Bill: it would concentrate unchecked power in a single body controlling billions of dollars in post-Hurricane Melissa reconstruction funds, without the governance architecture to match the responsibility.

People’s National Party President and Opposition Leader Mark Golding delivered that warning in a Friday press statement, while Senator Cleveland Tomlinson, the PNP’s Deputy Spokesperson on Productivity, Efficiency and Competitiveness, has simultaneously called for the Bill to be referred to a Joint Select Committee before Parliament proceeds any further.

The Bill, tabled by Prime Minister Andrew Holness, is designed to establish NaRRA as the command centre for Jamaica’s post-Melissa reconstruction — a programme backed by a coordinated US$6.7 billion multilateral financing package from the IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, CAF and the Caribbean Development Bank, the largest ever assembled for Jamaica, against assessed hurricane damage of US$12.2 billion.

The ambition is not in question. The danger, both men argue, is what happens when that much money flows through a structure with no board of governance, no internal auditor, no audit committee, and no embedded risk management function.

Two Voices, One Verdict

Golding’s central charge is structural. In parliamentary debate he confronted Prime Minister Holness directly over the absence of a statutory governance board. Holness responded that NaRRA would operate as an executive agency, overseen by the Jamaica Reconstruction and Resilience Oversight Committee (JAMRROC) — an external body modelled on the Economic Programme Oversight Committee.

Golding countered that NaRRA is a statutory body and requires statutory oversight to match. He is right: JAMRROC does not appear anywhere in the legislation, leaving it with no legal standing and no guaranteed continuity. It is an administrative comfort, not a legislative safeguard.

Tomlinson’s indictment is even more precise. “This cannot be right,” he told Parliament. “An Authority with such enormous financial responsibility must have basic internal governance structures in place. The Bill as it stands is missing essential pillars of accountability.”

His itemised list of what is absent reads like a checklist for institutional failure: no board, no audit committee, no internal auditor, no risk management. For an entity that will administer billions of public dollars and facilitate private sector investment through expedited procurement procedures, those are not bureaucratic niceties. They are the minimum conditions for public trust.

“The Bill as it stands is missing essential pillars of accountability.” — Senator Cleveland Tomlinson

Both men have called for a Joint Select Committee to examine the Bill with a finite deliberation period — Tomlinson proposing 60 to 90 days — before it is enacted into law. The argument is straightforward: urgency does not excuse the absence of governance, and a Joint Select Committee is precisely the instrument Parliament has at its disposal to fix structural gaps without indefinite delay.

The Chorus Grows

Golding and Tomlinson do not stand alone. Opposition spokesman Peter Bunting has described the Bill as a blank cheque without guardrails, warning that its combination of secrecy provisions, criminal penalties for disclosure, sweeping ministerial authority and blanket indemnity for officials creates fertile ground for corruption.

Civil society groups Jamaicans for Justice and the Jamaica Environment Trust have submitted formal recommendations to Parliament, pointing to a CEO-centric design in which the Prime Minister holds direct appointment authority with no merit-based selection requirement.

Even more revealing is the rupture within the government’s own ranks: JLP backbencher and former Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte — one of the most legally precise minds in Parliament — told her own executive to rework the Bill, warning that its functions “may collide with each other” and that no entity should be required to provide oversight of itself.

A Second Bite at a Poisoned Apple

This is already the government’s second attempt at this legislation. The first version was withdrawn by Holness under public pressure. The revised Bill has drawn identical objections from a broader coalition. The government’s insistence that urgency must override scrutiny is an argument that collapses under the weight of its own history: the delay created by withdrawing the first Bill is the delay the government is now using as justification to rush through the second.

Golding and Tomlinson are not obstructing reconstruction. They are insisting that reconstruction be built on foundations strong enough to hold. Jamaica has US$12.2 billion in hurricane damage to repair. It cannot afford to compound that figure with the cost of a governance failure buried inside the very law meant to fix it.

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