Letter of the Day | NaRRA’s real problem isn’t the salary. It’s the scoreboard.

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The recent anger over the pay of the CEO of the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) is not simple envy. The Government has confirmed that Major General Antony Anderson’s basic salary is $40 million per year and defended it as commensurate with the post’s responsibilities. The Office of the Prime Minister says the package is aligned with those of the heads of major public bodies such as the National Housing Trust and the Port Authority.

The figure may be defensible. The anger comes from experience. Jamaicans have watched highly paid public officials preside over projects that ran years late, exceeded budgets, and delivered outcomes that were never properly measured. They were rarely held accountable in any meaningful way. Big salaries were paired with little scrutiny, and the public learned to expect little in return.

Consider the Southern Coastal Highway Improvement Project. It began in November 2019 at US$384 million before rising construction and sewage costs pushed it over budget. By April 2025, the minister was describing a US$575-million project that was 96 per cent complete. That was long after a 2021 government release had projected completion in March 2022. Who was held accountable for the delays and cost overruns, and against what targets?

The pattern extends beyond roads. The Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ) provides another example. The Auditor General found that, from its creation in 2000, the DBJ had never assessed whether it was achieving its intended development outcomes despite lending $17.96 billion between 2009-10 and 2014-15. In 2015, the Auditor General also reported that she could not determine whether the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce was meeting its objectives because monitoring and evaluation of policies was inadequate.

Similar concerns have surrounded the tablets-in-schools programme, the Constituency Development Fund, and Jamaica’s Sustainable Development Goals initiative.

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is not an audit, and it is not a press release. Audits determine whether money was spent according to the rules. M&E examines whether spending achieved its objectives on time, within budget, and according to plan. A robust system links expenditure to measurable outputs and outcomes, sets targets, tracks progress, and publishes results.

The Government points to NaRRA’s oversight provisions, including reports to the minister and annual external audits. These are financial and compliance controls, not a comprehensive performance-management framework. Meanwhile, the Government rejected Opposition amendments aimed at strengthening accountability and independent oversight.

If the Government welcomes public interest in holding NaRRA and its CEO accountable, it should publish clear deliverables, baselines, targets, and timelines; release regular progress reports; commission independent evaluations; and tie part of the CEO’s compensation to verifiable results.

Jamaicans do not begrudge paying for excellence. They resent paying for what they cannot see. Give the public the scoreboard, and the salary debate will settle itself.

Sachel M. Clarke