A year after Jamaica joined Africa’s biggest trade bank to headlines about billions, the bank’s own audited accounts tell a much quieter story. Nobody has asked the obvious question out loud — including this newspaper, which got part of it wrong.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, August 31, 2026 | By Calvin G. Brown — On 2 June, at the AC Hotel by Marriott in Kingston, Finance and Public Service Minister Fayval Williams told an Afreximbank roadshow that the partnership between the bank and Jamaica was clearly continuing to strengthen.

Strengthening implies there is something already there to strengthen. Jamaica had signed the Partnership Agreement — the instrument by which CARICOM states join the African Export-Import Bank — on 8 July 2025, almost eleven months earlier. Yet the bank’s own release described that June event as an inaugural roadshow, one that put its financing, trade facilitation and investment products in front of the Jamaican market for the first time.