Mawnin’, Kingston.

So Holness flew to New York on Thursday to address a diaspora conference about how Jamaica is “Recovering Better” from Hurricane Melissa, and somewhere between the keynote and the question-and-answer he explained — to a room of Jamaicans living in the United States, where everyone has a bank account because they need one to function — that the reason the ROOFS Programme is moving slowly is because too many Jamaicans back home are unbanked.

Now. That is, technically, true. A meaningful chunk of the country does not hold a bank account. The Government cannot push grant money into accounts that do not exist. This is real. This is happening.

It is also a sentence that arrived at the New York podium with surprisingly little self-reflection about why, in the year 2026, after thirty-something years of various administrations, a meaningful chunk of Jamaica still doesn’t hold a bank account. The Prime Minister did not pause to consider whether the unbanked rate might itself be a measure of policy outcomes. He framed it as a bureaucratic obstacle to delivery — which is the language a delivery service uses when the address is wrong, not the language a government uses when the address is its own population.

He did, to his credit, propose a solution: NIDS. The National Identification System. Which has been “coming” since approximately 2017. Which is now also part of the answer to the ROOFS bottleneck, which is itself a bottleneck on the broader Hurricane Melissa response, which is itself a bottleneck on national reconstruction.

Bottlenecks all the way down. NIDS will fix it. NIDS, which has its own bottleneck history, will solve the bottlenecks. Sure.

NaRRA

The National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority Bill was tabled in updated form last Tuesday, and the Government is now describing it as “one of the most consequential pieces of legislation Parliament has been asked to” — well, the sentence trails off in the press release, which is itself a kind of editorial commentary.

NaRRA will lead reconstruction. It will run the new Kingston Public Hospital. It will expand Vernamfield. It will build the Heroes’ Circle Government campus. It will function as a “single point of national coordination” — that beautiful piece of consultancy English that means “we will eliminate the seventeen committees that are currently arguing with each other.”

The financing package — US$6.7 billion from the World Bank, IDB, CDB, CAF, and IMF — is genuinely impressive. The largest coordinated reconstruction package the region has assembled. The Prime Minister deserves credit for the diplomacy that made it happen.

The question, the only question, the one nobody is currently asking out loud, is whether the central coordination structure will function as the streamlined delivery vehicle the Prime Minister describes, or whether it will function the way large central coordination structures functioned during the Petrojam years, the NHT scandal years, and the various other periods Jamaicans of a certain age remember with great clarity.

Same architecture. Different paint. We will know in eighteen months whether the paint is load-bearing.

FAST LOWERS THE BAR FROM US$150 MILLION TO US$15 MILLION

The Facilitated Acceleration of Strategic Transformation, the body designed to fast-track major investment, was originally pitched as serving projects of US$150 million minimum. As of Tuesday, the threshold dropped to US$15 million.

Now, two readings of this.

Reading One, the Government’s: “We listened to the investment community and recognized that a US$150 million floor was excluding viable medium-sized projects. We’ve made the framework more inclusive.”

Reading Two, the cynical Kingston reading: there were not enough US$150 million projects in the pipeline, and somebody did the math and realized the FAST mechanism would have very little to do for the next eighteen months unless the threshold dropped. Lowering the floor by ninety percent gets a lot of projects into the queue very quickly. The Prime Minister can now point to a busy queue.

Both readings can be true at the same time. Most policy adjustments contain both motivations. The thing to watch is which projects actually get fast-tracked, and whether the speed comes at the expense of the safeguards Holness specifically promised would not be sacrificed. He used the word “boasted” about NaRRA’s discipline. The press release used the word. He may want to use a quieter word until the discipline is observable.

CASINO REGULATIONS APPROVED IN THE SENATE

The Casino Gaming (General) Regulations 2025 cleared the Senate on Friday, governed by the Casino Gaming Act of — and this is the part that requires sitting down — 2010.

Sixteen years. Sixteen years between the Act and the Regulations that operationalize the Act. In legislative time, that is the difference between a child being born and that child finishing high school. Senator Dr Elon Thompson said the regulations “strike the right balance.” One imagines the original 2010 drafters, now retired, mildly confused that the balance is being struck this late in the game.

The casino is now technically able to operate. The Casino Gaming Commission has its rules. The licensee obligations are documented. Sixteen years late. Better late than never, presumably, although the people who were planning casinos in 2010 may have moved on by now.

MURDER COUNT FOR THE MONTH

The good news, and credit where it is due, January 2026 recorded the lowest monthly murder figure since national crime statistics collection began in 2001. Thirty-three murders. That is fifty-five percent below January 2025. The Prime Minister attributes this to Plan Secure Jamaica, the framework introduced in 2016 and refined since.

That is a real number. It is not a perfect number — thirty-three murders in a country of 2.8 million is still thirty-three families that did not need to bury anyone — but it is the lowest in the data series. Holness deserves the win, and so do the JCF officers who delivered it, and so do the community-level interventions that supported it.

If this trend holds, by year-end Jamaica will be having a different conversation about its crime situation than it has had in two decades. If it does not hold — and Jamaica has watched promising crime trends collapse before — we will be back to the regular conversation. Watch April through July. The summer months always tell you whether the trend is structural or seasonal.

TWO MORE NIRA OFFICES OPEN IN ST CATHERINE TODAY

NIRA — the National Identification and Registration Authority — opens two additional offices in St Catherine today, Monday April 20. Apply early, my Catherinians. The lines, by the second week, will be long. The lines, by the second month, will be longer. NIDS rollout has historically followed the rule that demand exceeds projection in the first month, and the projection then has to be revised upward, and the revised projection then becomes the new bottleneck.

Foreign Affairs Minister Audrey Marks turned up to apply for her own NIDS card last week. A photograph was taken. The implicit message: if the Minister can do it, you can do it. The actual question: will the system handle the volume when the Minister is not standing at the front of the line?

THE REGGAE GIRLZ BEAT THE GUYANA WOMEN’S TEAM 2-0

Saturday’s W Qualifier in Group B at the National Stadium ended 2-0 in Jamaica’s favour. A workmanlike result against opposition that did not, on the day, threaten the Reggae Girlz’s progression. Coach pleased. Crowd modest. Caribbean football continuing its slow climb toward the next World Cup cycle.

The Girlz are quietly building. The men’s national side, less quietly, is making EPL transfer noise — Joel Latibeaudiere and Ephron Mason-Clark are reportedly in conversations that may put them in the Premier League next season. We will believe it when the medical happens. Caribbean transfer rumour is its own genre, with its own grammar, and the medical is the only verb that means anything.

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Two more arrests in the $80 million NCB phishing scam. Charges laid against record producer Jahvel “Jahvy Ambassador” Morrison in connection with the Big Wall carnival party shooting. Podcaster Jhaedee “Jaii Frais” Richards facing his own battery of charges from a separate carnival-party incident — Sunday morning, Kingston is processing a noticeable cluster of carnival-related criminal proceedings, which probably says something about how carnival is going generally.

Four men charged for armed robbery in Beecher Town, St Ann. Two arrested for goat theft in St Mary. The goats were stolen across multiple communities, which suggests organized goat theft, which is Jamaica being Jamaica.

That’s Kingston. Until tomorrow.

— Yard Report