Keynote Address at the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce 41st Annual Awards Banquet 2026

Thank you, Madame Master of Ceremonies, for your wonderful mastery of the ceremony. And let me thank you for that very kind introduction. It's always good to hear of the good things you do. Senator the Honorable Orin Hill, Mr. and Mrs. Hilton, his worship the mayor, councilor Andrew Swaybe, and he said that I should say my dear friend, Emil and Janelle, a lovely couple, and Emil I do admire the work that you do and congratulations on your presidency of the Chamber of Executive. Heads of various public and private bodies that are here. And just to sum it up all, all nice and decent people, thank you for inviting me to join you at the 41st annual awards banquet of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has been part of Jamaica's commercial life since 1779. I didn't know this until I was preparing for this presentation. And that means that the chamber has seen Jamaica through the colonial period, through independence, through periods of growth, periods of crisis, reconstruction, reform and renewal. And the institution, the organization still stands. That is institutional discipline. The same quality we are here to recognize tonight in the businesses that are part of your organization. As an aside, I was with a very prominent business leader, Caribbean business leader, and he was pointing out that the relationship between businesses and government across the Caribbean is not always one of partnership or cooperation. Sometimes it can be very combative. I am happy to say, and no one should contradict me, that the relationship between business and government in Jamaica is good. It is one of great cooperation. I certainly have taken the stance that business is not the enemy, that we should not make business people feel as if they are exploiters, that we must support our business people. We must promote entrepreneurism. We must celebrate people who make profit and give back even more. We must see businesses as integral to the growth of our country. The greatest mistake is to believe that government can grow the economy. Government can't grow the economy. The economy is grown by businesses. I know that Jamaica has suffered from a long conceptual framework that somehow businesses have led to an unequal distribution of income and wealth in the country. If we are to cross the threshold to become a developed country, to become a growing country, we must dispense with that view. The core of the Jamaican culture is competition. That is the core of any business economy. We have that natural core in our people. And what we must do is to prepare the track very well, get out of the way, set the rules, and train the runners. As we do for athletics, let us do it for business. So that was not in my script. Just sharing with you some thoughts. So the last few months has not been an easy road. Real GDP fell by 7.1% in the December quarter, the sharpest contraction in years. And this has been driven obviously by Hurricane Melissa. And costs are going up again driven by increased energy costs. And energy costs have gone up by some 60% since the Middle East conflict began. Grain prices are up. Shipping costs are elevated. And these are conditions that businesses would have had to navigate from last year to now. Bear in mind that after the COVID pandemic, we faced a round of sustained increases due to supply chain disruptions. So it has not been an easy time for business. The fact that you are still here. And by the way, this is the largest turnout in this room I've seen in a long time. You're looking good. And the fact that we're still here, still investing, still employing, still improving is a testament to your own resilience and commitment to Jamaica. And I want to commend you. Despite all the challenges, there is also good news. There is a lot to be proud of. Unemployment remains at record low. Inflation is back within the BOJ's target band. Our international reserves stand at US $6.5 billion, a record high. And let me just quickly add, don't come out with this. Let I'm at a lovely dinner here, so let me reserve my language with any suggestion that we must spend the reserves. The reserves are there for our protection. If you spend off the reserve, you have no protection. You become open to speculators and all kinds of attacks on your currency and then you become weak. And to my other great achievement to which we should all be proud, the exchange rate has been stable. Sometimes we forget that there was a time when our exchange rate was unstable and it has been stable now going through all kinds of crisis. Why? Because we have $6.5 billion reserve. And I gather that the exchange rate has appreciated slightly, not necessarily a good thing, but to make the point, all three major credit rating firms have reaffirmed our credit rating after hurricane Melissa. Moody's even upgraded us. Within weeks of the hurricane, the government mobilized 6 billion US dollars in reconstruction financing, the largest development financing package in Jamaica's history. Now, that didn't happen because of sympathy. It happened because the world watched us navigate six years of compounding crisis and concluded that our institutions were credible and our commitments would be kept. So we not only have a reserve of funds in the BOJ, we have a reserve of credibility in the Ministry of Finance. Let me repeat that. Jamaica has a reserve of credibility. And that credibility had immediate tangible consequences. Within weeks after Melissa, the government was able to write a check for 150 million US to the Jamaica Public Service Company to restore electricity to the country. We were never in such a position before to be able to do that. And there might be those wondering was that a good thing. But we were able to restore electricity. For a family sitting in darkness, for a farmer watching a season slip by, for a small business that could not open its doors, three weeks instead of six months, that is not a simple gesture. It is profound for the restoration of lives and livelihood. And we were able to do this because the country had credibility. Agricultural output has rebounded faster than projected. The Bank of Jamaica's initial outlook for economic recovery from Melissa was three to four years. It has revised that now to two to three years. We have also made historic improvements as was said earlier in public safety. After a 42% reduction in 2025, murders are now down a further 22.5% year to date. And this is not a flash in the pan. This is a sustained downward trajectory. In fact, murders are down 67% over the last four years. This is a game changer for Jamaican communities and Jamaican enterprise. So even after a sustained series of exogenous shocks over the last six months or six years, the macroeconomic foundation of Jamaica remains intact. The security environment is improving at pace. And the truth is that few would have predicted 10 years ago that we would be able to stand here today and say that murders are below 700. If you were to just think about it, 10 years ago, would you say that? All right. That's a challenge for all businesses who meet up on a shock. Your market has changed. The technology has changed. You are facing closure, bankruptcy. As a manager, an entrepreneur, you have to pivot. You have to look how do you repurpose, what's the next big thing that I could invest in? How do I repurpose and reposition capital? The same challenge you face as businesses coming out of a disaster. It's the same challenge that the government faces. So this is where the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority becomes central. After a major shock, the temptation is to patch what was broken and move on. That's the thinking of many Jamaicans. So just fix what is broken and move on. Jamaica has done too much of this over many years. A road washes away, we repair the road. A bridge fails, we replace the bridge. The water system breaks, we just simply restore service. And that seems logical. That's what we should do. That's what the average person in the public would be clamoring for. Fix my road. Fix my bridge, return my water. But then another event comes and the same road washes away. In other words, the same weak point fails. So the difference between rebuilding for reconstruction and rebuilding for transformation is that we are not looking to rebuild weak points. And if we're going to rebuild, we must question should we rebuild this in the same way in the same place? Or should we re-imagine this? Should we take the opportunity to do it differently to take away the exposure to failure? Every business in this room has paid for that cycle in lost inventory, missed delivery deadlines, suppliers that couldn't perform, customers that couldn't be reached. Infrastructure weakness is not a government problem. It is a costly business that falls on you. So the need to not just build for recovery but build for resurgence, build for stronger, better. It is a public good but it is critically important for business. So NAR is meant to break that cycle for good. Its mandate is not restoration. I want to just say that clearly. The mandate of NAR is not restoration. It is reconstruction that strengthens roads rebuilt to move goods with super reliability. Water systems that support agriculture, tourism, and industry. Energy infrastructure that reduces exposure to the next shock. And procurement that moves faster but still protects the public's purse. So NAR is about doing things differently but better and stronger. As you played the clip of your efforts to clean downtown Kingston, my mind reflected on my graduation from St. Katherine High School. I met a few alumni here and I went to the ball downtown Kingston. At that time there was a hotel down there. Not the rock, the one before the rock, Sheraton Ocean. Ocean is such a long time ago. And it was a lovely ball. In fact, we could you imagine this? We slept on the grass. Yeah. And then took the bus and went home in the morning. That's how safe it was. But it hasn't changed in over 40 years. In fact, it looks worse. I think it behooves all of us here to recognize that there has been considerable disinvestment in the infrastructure of our capitals. Indeed the infrastructure generally of the island. And so while I applaud the attempt it is merely a patch. There's so much more to do for downtown Kingston. The infrastructure there is in need of significant intervention. From the sewage to the roads to the sick buildings, it needs a massive plan. We are standing in our way. The level of economic and social mobilization that is required. It is not now only a matter of how it will be financed. The question is do we have the administrative and organizational capability to do it with speed? Can our bureaucracy that we have built, can it manage transformation? That is now the new struggle. Can we get things done quickly at pace and at scale? And that is why we needed to have created NAR because the current bureaucracy simply could not take on the transformation that will be required in the recovery from Hurricane Melissa. The current bureaucracy has never spent 6 billion US dollars in any capital program. Think about it. And that is why we had to create literally a new framework to manage it. So speed matters. So does discipline. Jamaica has no shortage of plans. What we need now is execution at a higher standard and a faster pace. The private sector is not a spectator in this. We need contractors who can deliver quality work on time. We need engineers, architects, quantity surveyors, project managers, manufacturers, financiers, insurers. Where are the insurers in the room here? Pay up. We need companies that will compete fairly, price honestly, hire locally where possible and meet the highest standards. We also need the private sector to help to build the supply chains that can respond to crisis. You know, I commend the private sector for coming together immediately in the aftermath of the hurricane. You mentioned that group that met to work out your distribution and the logistics and to cooperate with government. Indeed I had a delegation of some private sector people who came to me to say how can we help? Because the government's response I think they felt it looked a little bit shaky, like it wasn't delivering at the speed and at the level that they had expected. And so I do admire the Jamaican private sector. They're always willing to come and give support and they're very organized. And I commend the Jamaican private sector because you got your distribution networks up and running very quickly and in fact that is what triggered a very quick restoration. But you know your government has been very strategic. We focus on the things that government should focus on like getting roads cleared and open so that the distribution trucks can get goods out. We have to strike a very careful balance. We recognized that many Jamaicans overseas would want to send things for their family here and as much as we could we facilitated but we also knew that as things were coming in the ports were being clogged and commerce was being killed. So we had to strike that balance to ensure that after the philanthropic interests dried up, our distribution businesses were still alive to be able to continue business. So during the management of the hurricane disaster, we had to take some very strategic decisions that balanced interests of persons who would want to see more philanthropic support but also ensure that we balance to ensure our businesses could survive, stand up their operations and be able to continue after the philanthropic efforts have subsided. And I think we created that balance because I don't think anyone could say that in any way the philanthropic aid that came in impacted the markets generally in terms of goods and prices and so forth. We kept a close watch just to make sure that what we were doing was not inadvertently destroying commerce in Jamaica. So I said that because we don't write books on events anymore. We make posts. You know 300 words don't capture the fundamentals and profundity of challenges. So at every little occasion I had dropped in a snippet of some of the things that government has to do that people don't consider. So like that was one of them to make sure that businesses were able to function and not be destroyed in a sense by activities that could flood markets and destroy supply chains. So reconstruction spending, it is not just repair. It is the single largest economic intervention that Jamaica will make in a generation. I want to say that again. The reconstruction spending that will come in NAR, it won't be just any ordinary capital expenditure. It will be the single largest economic intervention that will be made in a generation possibly in the 200 and odd years of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce. It will be the largest intervention. The possibility is that we could increase our GDP by more than 20%. As a result, every dollar spent on rebuilding this country is an opportunity to do more than restore what existed before. We are not rebuilding the old Jamaica. We are building the foundation of a new Jamaica. More competitive, more resilient, less exposed to the next shock. That means roads built not just to carry today's traffic, but to open new corridors for commerce, logistics, and housing. Water systems designed not just for current demand, but to meet agricultural expansion and expansion in tourism. Energy infrastructure that reduces our dependence on imported fuels and locks in lower costs for households and businesses for decades to come. This is a big challenge, the challenge of energy. JPS is here. We are going through negotiations now. The intention is to lock in with a license certain changes that will see tangible reductions in electricity and energy costs for households and businesses. Jamaica's energy costs are prohibitive and we have to tackle it. We must make substantial improvements in it. But we cannot place all our hopes for reduction on a renegotiated license. We must now explore in meaningful ways the large scale deployment of alternative energy sources. And we must prepare ourselves to be able to deploy nuclear technology. Because nuclear technology is becoming the de facto clean energy resource. So we have to put ourselves in that position. And it's not going to be long. It's going to be a decade or so. But to be able to deploy that you have to prepare from now. So we are looking at the energy sector in real ways to make real changes. But we also need stronger firms. We need stronger contracting firms. Firms that are investing in themselves. Firms that are hiring the engineers and the architects and the project managers to be able to deliver the large projects that will come under NAR. But since I have this room, NAR is not only about government expenditure. There may be in this room companies that have projects that they want to have executed. NAR is that platform. We have stated that if you have a project 15 million US or above and it fits within the reconstruction and resilience, it is in alignment with any of the other projects that the government is doing, come to us, utilize the NAR platform for approvals and processing and potential also for financing and let us crowd in the private investment with the public investment. In other words, the $6 billion that the government is hoping to deploy could easily be multiplied by several factors over if the private sector is fully mobilized for this effort. So I'm using this opportunity to plant the seed in your minds to start to think about all those projects that you have developed but you have put in file 13. Now may be the time to pull them, dust them off, revisit them, and see whether or not they can be crowded into the NAR investment train line. So that brings me to my closing of the presentation. You've been such a lovely audience as I rambled on. Productivity. So we have dealt with violence, fiscal discipline, resilience building, and now we're building resurgence. But the elephant is in the room which we don't speak of is that of Jamaica's productivity. We are the third lowest in terms of regional productivity. Many issues wrapped up in that. But I would just like to say that productivity is the heart of growth. It is how we turn effort into value. It is how wages rise without pushing prices out of control. I want to repeat that because as we are in this era, this period of wage negotiations, there is the view that you can increase wages inordinately and it is of no impact on prices. If wages don't match productivity and you increase wages, it's inflationary. It means you're going to come back again next year, ask for more wage increases because prices have increased and you come back again the following year and you're caught in this vicious cycle which we have been caught in for the last 40 years. So I just thought I would say it here. Maybe we'll have more people saying it so that the outlook and view of the society can change and people can start to focus on really what do they produce? What do we produce as a people to claim increased wages? It's a discussion we need to have. There's no value in money if it is not backed by production. And if you give people more money and there is no production to back it, then you're just paying more for the same production. It is an idea that needs to seep into the minds of the average Jamaican. So it is how businesses grow without passing on higher costs to consumers. Again, another area that needs some discussion. It is how government collects more revenues without raising taxes. It is how Jamaica will compete with its peers. Productivity. Improving productivity must become a national habit for government. That means faster approvals, better project management, cleaner procurement, stronger digital services and infrastructure that reduces the cost of doing business. And that's what the government is committed to doing for businesses. It means investing in equipment, technology, training, management systems, export readiness, energy efficiency, and quality control. And I know every business here represented is doing just that. Trying to improve your productivity in order to compete. And for our workers, it means skills. Improving skills. And since I have the business community here, every day a business person said to me, 'Listen, Prime Minister, I cannot find people to work. But when I go out into the field, I see a lot of people not working.' It is a challenge for businesses and it is indeed at this point a constraint on growth. The question is how do we attract the people who have decided to withhold their labor? How do we attract them into the labor market? It is a national conversation that must be had. But as our country grows and our economy grows and we approach full employment, which we are almost at full employment, we are going to have to have a new labor policy and a new policy on work. Because the current situation is indeed constraining on your output and your efficiency. But it also means that the Chamber of Commerce needs to join the conversation, needs to become stronger advocates. And you can't just leave it up to myself and Tony because I am going to say one thing and anything I said Tony going to say the opposite. So we need to hear the voice of the business community to not just advocate for your position but to have a conversation with your employees and your customers to speak generally so that the entire Jamaica can understand where we are today. It is totally different from the 70s where we are today. Jamaica could become Dubai or Singapore where if our economy grows, we might have to bring people in to keep the economy turning over. Yes. And can you imagine that Jamaica has reached that stage? It is how Cayman has grown, Antigua is growing, all of these other countries that have taken our labor to build their industries. Right. We mustn't see ourselves as closed, insulated, xenophobic, isolated. We have to see ourselves as a country where people want to come and live. And we must embrace them. Get the crime down. Get the efficiency up. Clean up the streets. Start the reinvestment. You won't have a hand to sell Jamaica. Look, the model of development and growth for many years has been how many visitors can we have in tourism. That model needs to shift. It has to be how many people can we get to come and live in Jamaica. So it's not just the one-off five-day tourism dollar that gets circulated out of the country. We want people to come here and live and spend and hire and create and do business. By the way, that's Vision 2030. That is Vision 2030. Jamaica, the place of choice to live, work, do business, raise family, and then I said retire in paradise. Yes. So ladies and gentlemen, tonight we celebrate firms and individuals who held their standards high when it was the hardest to do so. Several sectors that suffered the sharpest contractions after Melissa are represented in the room. The businesses being recognized tonight kept going. They kept investing when certainty was low and costs were high. And that is not a small thing. You are anchor firms, companies that don't disappear when conditions deteriorate. You are the foundation on which our economy and country depends. And I want to thank you and encourage you. Don't be pausing in your clap. That's a... Government will continue to protect economic stability. We will continue to invest in infrastructure. We will continue to confront crime. We will continue to support our reconstruction through NAR. And we will continue to work with you. But we need you to keep investing, keep training, keep exporting, keep improving. And of course, keep holding the government to account. And remember, you have to also hold yourselves to account. So let us build roads that carry commerce. Let us build firms that can compete beyond our shores. Let us build workers who are ready for the economy and that is workers that are productive and creative. Let us build a country that can take a shock, quickly recover and accelerate its growth. The Jamaica Chamber of Commerce is our partner. We respect you and we support you. Thank you for your leadership across 247 years of Jamaican commercial life. To the nominees and awardees, congratulations again. May God bless you. May God bless Jamaica.