NaRRA Under ATTACK! Dawes EXPOSES What They Don’t Want You to Know

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-08

[00:00:01]Mr. Speaker NARA in its present form is rubbing butter a puss mouth.

[00:00:16]Power corrupts and now Jamaicans are being warned that this NARA bill could write that corruption straight into law.

[00:00:23]Tonight, Dr. Alfred Dawes is not holding back. This is Mishy Dex commentary. If you value truth, context and Caribbean voices that don't bow to pressure, like, share and subscribe.

[00:00:37]But listen to this.

[00:00:40]>> [music] >> In a fiery contribution to the NARA debate, Dr. Alfred Dawes has issued a serious warning to the Jamaican people and it goes beyond politics.

[00:00:56]>> [music] >> He is raising concerns about sweeping indemnity provisions inside the bill.

[00:01:00]Provisions that could shield wrongdoing and even place the burden of legal defense on you, the taxpayer. [music] Dawes makes it clear, when oversight is weakened and accountability is limited, >> [music] >> the door opens wide for abuse.

[00:01:17]Mr. Speaker NARA in its present form is rubbing butter a puss mouth.

[00:01:40]I say that without apology because the people watching these debates understand exactly what this means. It means do not give something precious and powerful to someone who has repeatedly showing you that they will abuse it and it means if you do, do not pretend you did not know it would happen.

[00:02:06]We are not being asked to give NARA power and hope for the best. We are being asked to strip NARA of accountability and pretend nothing will go wrong.

[00:02:22]Mr. Speaker, let us examine precisely what this bill creates at its center.

[00:02:30]One CEO appointed directly by the Prime Minister. No merit-based selection requirement in the bill.

[00:02:38]No independent vetting. No governing board with fiduciary duties. An advisory board only with no power to override. No power to dismiss. No power to compel.

[00:02:52]They call it an advisory board, but advice without authority is not governance. IT IS CHATTINGS.

[00:03:03]THIS CEO this Caesar will exercise authority over nearly 2 trillion Jamaican dollars. He will select his own auditor annually subject only to the approval of the cabinet secretary who serves the same cabinet that appointed Caesar in the first place.

[00:03:29]So Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister appoints the CEO. The CEO selects the auditor.

[00:03:38]The cabinet secretary approves the auditor. The cabinet secretary serves the Prime Minister. This is not a circle of accountability.

[00:03:47]This is circling THE WAGONS.

[00:03:55]FOR 2 TRILLION dollars of public funds this is what we are signing away.

[00:04:03]We are being asked to spend the money now and account for it later, but later is too late for the people whose money is being spent today.

[00:04:12]And if you dare to speak about what is happening inside that authority, section 14 provides criminal penalties of up to 1 million dollars or 1 year in prison for unauthorized disclosure. No express whistleblower protection clause. None.

[00:04:31]Then we have a sweeping indemnity regime that can cover even criminal proceedings. So they commit a crime and the taxpayers have to pay for it, for their defense.

[00:04:44]They have criminalized speaking the truth about NARA and they have indemnified those who abuse it. The watchdog has been muzzled. The fox has been released and the chicken coop is guarded by a CEO who may or may not love fried chicken.

[00:05:09]And that's not all.

[00:05:10]>> [music] >> He is also questioning the government's priorities. Why are major infrastructure projects like a new government campus being fast-tracked under a disaster recovery framework >> [music] >> while many Jamaicans are still struggling to rebuild their homes after Hurricane Melissa?

[00:05:27]For Dawes, this is bigger than just policy. This is about trust. This is about transparency and this is about whether recovery funds are truly for the people or for long-standing government ambitions.

[00:05:40]The question is what NARA is for.

[00:05:43]Is NARA the answer to the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa?

[00:05:48]Or was Hurricane Melissa the answer to this government's long and deliberate march towards authoritarianism and absolutism?

[00:05:58]>> [cheering] >> Because, Mr. Speaker, the bill before us does not give power to the people to rebuild their country.

[00:06:13]It takes power from the people and gives it to one man accountable to one minister anointed by one Prime Minister.

[00:06:24]WHAT IS PROPOSED HERE TODAY is a bill that entrenches this government's long-held desire to concentrate power and resources into the hands of a few and to castrate the state agencies and civil servants whose constitutional roles are to act as watchdogs over every taxpayer dollar.

[00:06:52]Mr. Speaker I have searched the Caribbean the Americas the globe for a reconstruction body with a similar oversight and accountability framework.

[00:07:06]I did not find a better model that Jamaica ignored. I found that Jamaica invented the worst model.

[00:07:16]I am convinced that this government has designed the weakest governance model for a disaster reconstruction authority that has ever been assembled by a modern democracy.

[00:07:29]A model destined by its very architecture to be scandal-ridden.

[00:07:36]Destined to fail in the strategic objectives of efficient, resilient and meaningful reconstruction of the infrastructure and the lives of Jamaican people.

[00:07:49]The Prime Minister spoke of Peru.

[00:07:52]He carried us thousands of miles across the world to find his cautionary tale.

[00:07:59]But, Mr. Speaker, we need not travel that far. The answers are closer to home. The warnings are in our neighborhood.

[00:08:09]When Hurricane Dorian swept through the Bahamas in September 2019, a category 5 storm, the strongest ever to make direct landfall in that nation, the Bohemian government did not reach for a CEO with absolute powers and an advisory board.

[00:08:29]They built a full governing board of directors with legally bound fiduciary duties.

[00:08:37]The Disaster Reconstruction Authority Act of 2019 established a separate chairman, a vice chairman, a managing director, not one omnipotent executive answerable to only a Prime Minister.

[00:08:54]But a board with duties, with power, with accountability baked into the law itself.

[00:09:04]The Bahamas did not trust their reconstruction to one man. They trusted it to a board. And yet this government asks that Jamaica trust all of us to one man with no board.

[00:09:19]On procurement, the very area this bill defers to with a ministerial order after it passes the Bohemians wrote the obligation directly into their law.

[00:09:29]All contracts awarded within a fiscal year must be publicly disclosed. Their audited accounts had to reach the minister within 3 months of the financial year end.

[00:09:40]But Mr. Speaker, even with all of that the Bahamas still had a scandal.

[00:09:47]Their forensic audit revealed extreme executive salaries with no basis in performance, companies billing the government for work that they can't prove.

[00:09:57]And contractors doing they submit without submitting evidence of a single work days work done. $20 million spent on debris management with non-compliant contractors. The Bahamas had stronger oversight and still fell apart. And Jamaica through this government wants us with weaker oversight to stand with them. Cannot work.

[00:10:22]The logic does not hold.

[00:10:25]The math does not add up and the people will pay the price.

[00:10:32]But he didn't stop there.

[00:10:34]Dawes also challenged the credibility of the government's promises under this [music] bill.

[00:10:38]He's asking a question many Jamaicans are quietly thinking. Are we really expected to believe this now?

[00:10:44]He pointed to past actions from unequal enforcement during COVID to neglected community roads to ongoing concerns about public spending priorities.

[00:10:54]His message is simple. Trust must be earned, not assumed. [music] Mr. Mr. Speaker Let me speak to what is truly at stake. They raise a point of order. Is an internal audit of a one year?

[00:11:16]Mr. Speaker, let me speak to what is truly at stake. Because this is not a debate about institutional design.

[00:11:26]This is a debate about the future of Jamaica.

[00:11:31]The destructive force of Hurricane Melissa can be a blessing in disguise.

[00:11:37]If the short-term pain unlocks the long-term transformation of this country.

[00:11:43]$2 trillion dollars the largest injection of capital into this economy in our history.

[00:11:49]This could solve the age-old problems that have plagued ordinary Jamaicans for generations.

[00:11:55]It is not the magnitude of the storm that defines a disaster. It is the nation's response to the disaster of the storm.

[00:12:04]Let us not make this crisis go to waste in building a better Jamaica.

[00:12:11]We could build roads that do not flood every season. Drains that channel water rather than carry away communities.

[00:12:19]Government buildings that do not shame the people who work in them. Houses that are designed for Jamaicans to live in with dignity. Not relics of an era before black Jamaicans were smartified.

[00:12:32]We have the money to build a new Jamaica, but we are choosing the governance structures of the old plantocracy.

[00:12:41]Instead of hearing 28 civil society organizations instead of hearing 29 members I see you member 29 members of parliament instead of hearing the joint submission of Jamaicans for justice and the Jamaica Environment Trust, this government presses forward.

[00:13:04]The Auditor General even before this bill has even passed has already launched a Hurricane Melissa relief governance audit because the patterns of mismanagement were already present.

[00:13:16]They're visible in the early relief response.

[00:13:19]The Auditor General is already auditing the relief. And this government is passing a law to keep scrutiny away from the construct reconstruction.

[00:13:29]They have seen the scrutiny coming. And they're legislating it away.

[00:13:34]We are not building the NARA that Jamaica needs. We are building the conditions that will require another NARA when God forbid the predicted devastating earthquake strikes or when the next killer storm comes to this beloved island.

[00:13:48]We are not building back better. We are building forward worse. But this time with $2 trillion dollars to accelerate the next collapse. Worse.

[00:14:02]Madam And when billions of dollars are on the line, Jamaicans deserve clear answers, strong oversight, and real accountability.

[00:14:13]Mr. Speaker Lord Acton warned us power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[00:14:24]This government is not merely ignoring that warning. They are writing it into law and calling it efficiency.

[00:14:37]Mr. Speaker The Prime Minister announced that NARA will build a new Kingston Public Hospital and we always welcome that. But he also announced a new government campus at National Heroes Circle. And I have a simple question for this honorable house. Why is this government building a new home for itself when the people who elected it are still without a home?

[00:15:09]THE NEW PARLIAMENT BUILDING the new government campus, the new KPH, these were on government wish list long before Hurricane Melissa arrived, which is why we ask again, is Melissa this the answer to the prayers of the government?

[00:15:26]Melissa did not create these ambitions.

[00:15:29]Melissa created the financing to pay for these ambitions.

[00:15:33]Financing that future generations of Jamaicans will have to repay with interest.

[00:15:40]The storm destroyed the people's homes and the government is using the money collected and meant to rebuild those homes to build their own legacy project and home.

[00:15:55]For 10 years 10 consecutive years every major hospital in Western Jamaica has crumbled under the weight of the Cornwall Regional debacle.

[00:16:07]Patients on Westmoreland, St. Elizabeth, and Hanover traveled all the way to Kingston because the regional hospital could not serve them.

[00:16:15]And for 10 years this government did nothing sufficient.

[00:16:21]Now Melissa has come. Now there is Melissa money and what rises to the top of the project list?

[00:16:27]The government campus the parliament building.

[00:16:31]For 10 years they could not find the money to fix the hospital that serves the west. Now they have found the money and they're spending it on the east. The people who suffered the most are the last in line.

[00:16:47]Relax Rose, wait, wait.

[00:16:49]Rose east, Kingston.

[00:16:53]Priorities. Rose of all the people interrupting me.

[00:16:58]And who decides? The bill is explicit.

[00:17:02]The cabinet shall cause to be issued the authorized and official list of approved projects.

[00:17:07]NARA cannot even originate its own project list.

[00:17:11]Every comparable reconstruction body in the world, in the Bahamas, in Haiti was empowered to identify and originate projects. NARA must wait to be told what to do.

[00:17:23]The authority has all the power to build, but it has no power to decide what to build.

[00:17:30]The power to execute is given to NARA.

[00:17:33]The power to direct is kept by the cabinet. This is not delegation. This is subcontracting corruption.

[00:17:45]If the Prime Minister if the Prime Minister decides that the new parliament building is a reconstruction and resilience project it goes on the list.

[00:17:59]And NARA builds it. With your money.

[00:18:02]Without a board to question it, without a parliamentary parliamentary vote on procurement, without an Auditor General review.

[00:18:11]Because at the end of the day this is not just about what is being promised.

[00:18:15]It's about whether the people can believe it.

[00:18:17]>> Rather than the dogmatic entrenchment of partisan positions.

[00:18:23]That we understand that our positions are not absolute truths. They are probabilities.

[00:18:31]And through honest debate, through the examination of evidence, we update these probabilities. We move closer to what is right, closer to what works, closer to what the people need.

[00:18:48]We did not come to parliament to win arguments. We came to parliament to win a future for the people.

[00:18:59]And Mr. Speaker, if there was ever a moment that demanded that approach from this chamber, it is now.

[00:19:09]Hurricane Melissa was the worst disaster to strike this nation in a generation.

[00:19:16]The assessed damage over $12 billion US.

[00:19:20]The people of Western Jamaica the mother in Maroon Town the fisherman in Black River the farmer in Darliston the child in Falmouth, they are not waiting for us to be right. They are waiting for us to get it right.

[00:19:42]And being right, Mr. Speaker, and getting it right are not always the same.

[00:19:48]If we are genuine servant leaders, not merely in title but in practice, then I beg this honorable house examine the evidence, weigh it honestly, update your positions so that the bill we pass today into law will secure the present of the people who sent us here and the future of the children and grandchildren they are raising in rubble.

[00:20:15]We were not sent here by the powerful to protect the powerful.

[00:20:21]We were sent here by the powerless to protect them from the powerful.

[00:20:30]Mr. Speaker, the man in the street watching these debates is asking one question.

[00:20:37]What is NARA?

[00:20:39]The superficial answer is that NARA is a reconstruction body, but the question is not what NARA And remember, family, watching the ads helps support the channel and allows me to keep bringing you more content. Walk good, Jamaica.