Editorial | ODPEM in risky times

Unless the recommended restructuring of the government’s disaster management system was only for a change of its top leader, last week’s shake-up at the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) in the midst of the agency’s response to a major natural catastrophe seems, on its face, a very risky move.

Richard Thompson, the ODPEM’s long-standing executive director, was removed and given a seemingly innocuous job in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), while the agency itself was taken from the local government ministry to become one of the multiplicity of ministries, agencies and departments in the portfolio of the PM.

ODPEM’s new leaders, including the installed director general, Commander Alvin Gayle, as well as whoever the PM designates as his day-to-day contact with the agency, will inevitably have to climb a learning curve, while at the same time grappling with the oversight of a complex relief and mitigation operation. That is notwithstanding Commander Gayle’s reported fine skills in logistics management, which were said to have been employed on behalf of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF).

These issues could be further stressed by, if true, declining morale and confidence among ODPEM’s staff over a perception of being thrown under the bus by Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness – which is the essence of a complaint by the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA).

The ODPEM staff may have wrongly interpreted the prime minister’s remarks. However, as Dr Holness ought to be aware, perception is often as good as reality. In the circumstances, he and Commander Gayle must act with urgency to assuage the concerns to head off a festering of resentments, which could weaken and undermine in large swathes the disaster relief programme of western Jamaica in large swathes, where over 30,000 people are internally displaced.

IMMEDIATELY APPARENT

The developments at ODPEM, though, highlight more than what is immediately apparent. They epitomise both management failures, the weakened state of many Jamaican institutions, and the undermining of their governance structures. Which is symptomatic of the retreat of the Jamaican State over the past three decades.

In wresting ODPEM from the control of Desmond McKenzie, the local government minister, and placing Mr Thompson in some nook at the OPM, the prime minister was apparently displaying his dissatisfaction with the agency’s initial response to the Melissa disaster.

Officially, however, the move was to ensure“a single point for emergency logistics and further tightens coordination with relief partners” and “accelerate the distribution of relief supplies”.

In plain language: those who now run ODPEM can’t manage – not a disaster of this magnitude.

The question is how, and why, it has been allowed to come to this. The deterioration of ODPEM was mission creep in plain sight.

Concerns about the agency, and the wider disaster planning, preparation, mitigation and relief apparatus, deepened after the outerbands of Hurricane Beryl clipped such of Jamaica’s south coast last year, causing significant damage, especially in the west of the island. The official response to that disaster was deemed to be too slow and halting.

In the aftermath of Beryl, Prime Minister Holness established a committee reviewing the island’s disaster risk management systems. The specific terms of reference of that committee were not published. Neither, unfortunately, was its report.

However, in a speech in June of this year, Dr Holness characterised its findings as “sobering”.

“One of the committee’s foremost recommendations was the urgent need to restructure and modernise the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management,” he said.

Urgent!

Among the weaknesses in the disaster preparedness system, Dr Holness said about the findings of the review committee, were in “cooperation, data-sharing and rapid execution”.

EXCEEDINGLY UNFORTUNATE

This is exceedingly unfortunate. It was the result, in part, of the systematic erosion, if not dismantling, of the professional and technical leadership of ODPEM and the ascendancy of the political executive. For over three decades, starting with its predecessor, the Office of Disaster Preparedness (ODP), ODPEM emerged as a model disaster preparedness and relief organisation with technically competent and empowered leadership. Franklin McDonald, the ODP’s founding executive director, set the tone.

Outstanding successors like Barbara Carby and Ronald Jackson, who also led the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), followed this trend. In part, because they were allowed to.

Over the past decade, however, an erosion set in where the professional and technical leadership was clearly secondary, even in technical matters, to the political bosses.

There was, for instance, the spectacle of a 2016 press briefing ahead of Hurricane Matthew, which was hogged by Mr McKenzie, with ODPEM’s leadership being allowed little say, even on the technical aspects of the storm and the agency’s proposed responses to it.

In a public response, Dr Carby, who then taught at The University of the West Indies (UWI) said: “There is nowhere in the world where, a few hours before a disaster is expected to make an impact, you do not have the head of the disaster agency addressing the public ... .”

Well, it happens in Jamaica. And not as an isolated incident.

In October 2023, Jamaica was hit by a 5.3 magnitude earthquake. Within minutes, Prime Minister Holness and his cabinet colleagues were making public comments on the development.

It took five hours for ODPEM to issue a public statement. Which was defended by Richard Thompson as “following protocol”.

Hopefully, these systemic failures are being corrected. It’s still not too late to publish the review committee’s report.