标签： Jamaica

Nearly eight months after Category 5 Hurricane Melissa carved a path of destruction across Jamaica, the island nation’s government has tapped a decorated veteran public servant to lead its long-awaited recovery and resilience-building effort, drawing measured praise and cautious scrutiny from private sector and civil society leaders.

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness announced the appointment of Major General (Ret’d) Antony Anderson as the inaugural chief executive officer of the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) during a special post-Cabinet media briefing at Jamaica House on Wednesday, confirming the retired military leader will officially take up his post on June 1. The announcement comes just days after the NaRRA Bill was signed into law, formalizing the new agency’s mandate to coordinate and accelerate the island’s post-storm reconstruction while strengthening national capacity to withstand future climate disasters.

With more than 40 years of public service spanning multiple critical national leadership roles, Anderson brings an unparalleled resume of crisis management and institutional leadership to the new position. His career began with a 34-year tenure in the Jamaica Defence Force, where he rose to the top post of chief of defence staff. He went on to become Jamaica’s first national security advisor to the prime minister, later served as commissioner of the Jamaica Police Force, and most recently held the role of Jamaica’s ambassador to the United States. Now, he is tasked with delivering a timely, transparent and accountable recovery for communities devastated by the October 2024 storm.

In his remarks Wednesday, Holness emphasized that Anderson’s appointment comes at a make-or-break juncture for Jamaica’s recovery program. The government is moving to scale up reconstruction work while embedding strict frameworks for accountability, transparency and fiscal stewardship over billions in recovery funding.

“Major General Antony Anderson brings to NaRRA the discipline, integrity, and operational command required for this moment,” Holness said. “Jamaica is entering a period of reconstruction that must be defined by speed, but also by transparency, proper planning, and accountability. His experience leading national institutions, responding to crises, and strengthening disaster risk management systems makes him well-suited to drive this mandate.” The prime minister added that NaRRA’s core mission is to build stronger, more disaster-resilient communities across the island, and that his administration will ensure every dollar of recovery funding advances long-term national development, productivity and economic growth.

Early reactions from Jamaica’s leading private sector bodies have been overwhelmingly positive, with leaders pointing to Anderson’s proven track record of integrity and leadership as exactly what the high-stakes role demands. Patrick Hylton, president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica, called the appointment a welcome choice for the critical post.

“From my personal knowledge of him, as well as his track record, he is the consummate professional, very experienced, very knowledgeable, with a good sense of judgement and great personal and professional integrity,” Hylton told the Jamaica Observer. He added that Anderson’s decades of public service, deep understanding of Jamaica’s local context, extensive professional networks and broad public respect make him uniquely positioned to deliver results for the recovery effort.

Kathryn Silvera, president of the Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association (JMEA), echoed Hylton’s assessment, noting that past challenges with relief fund management make disciplined, ethical leadership non-negotiable for NaRRA. “His track record of integrity and results gives confidence that he will act with transparency, resist undue influence, and ensure accountability in this critical role,” Silvera said.

Not all stakeholders have offered unqualified endorsement, however. While civil society leaders universally praised Anderson’s qualifications and decades of distinguished service, many have retained cautious reservations about the structural transparency of NaRRA itself, calling for clearer public disclosure of the agency’s mandates, timelines and budget allocations ahead of its launch.

Dr Gavin Myers, principal director of national anti-corruption watchdog National Integrity Action, noted that Anderson’s career across the military, law enforcement and diplomacy leaves no question about his qualifications for the role. But he emphasized that Jamaica’s longstanding culture of low public trust means proactive transparency is essential to build public confidence in the recovery effort.

“We would value information up front rather than things coming out trickle by trickle,” Myers said. He called for full public disclosure of Anderson’s core duties, key operational milestones and allocated recovery budgets ahead of the June 1 launch, so Jamaican citizens can hold agency leadership accountable from day one. “It would be good to know these from early so that we the citizens can work with and watch with Major Anderson,” he added.

Emile Leiba, president of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, echoed that wait-and-see approach, affirming confidence in Anderson’s capabilities but noting that the proof of NaRRA’s success will be in its operational performance. “Based on his track record in his leadership positions prior to this, I think he would be a good pick because the role does require significant organisational skills to monitor and keep track of the large-scale projects outlined in the NaRRA legislation,” Leiba said. “However, it’s very early days yet, so we’ll have to see how it all works out in practice.”

Leiba extended well wishes to Anderson and the government, noting that the entire nation has a stake in NaRRA’s success. “For the sake of the country, we certainly hope it’s a viable venture. If it’s not, then that has very serious implications. But the country needs NaRRA to succeed, and so we should all make reasonable efforts for that success to happen,” he said. “It’s one thing to legislate, it’s quite another for it to be operationalised, and so we have to wait and see how it operates from a functional perspective and then we take it from there.”

A provocative new push from within the Trump administration has sparked fierce debate across Washington, as senior political figures and regulators clash over a proposal to add former President Donald Trump’s portrait to a newly created $250 United States banknote, a plan that would break 150 years of established American currency tradition.

Details of the initiative were first reported by *The Washington Post* on Thursday, which obtained internal design mockups for the proposed bill. The draft concept frames the new banknote as a tribute to America’s 250th anniversary of independence, marked in 2026, with the wording “America 250 anniversary” printed alongside Trump’s image. According to the publication, two senior Trump appointees at the US Treasury Department began lobbying leadership at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to develop working prototypes of the bill as early as last year.

If the plan moves forward, it would mark the first time in 150 years that a living American has been featured on official US currency, breaking a long-standing norm and explicit federal regulation that prohibits depictions of sitting presidents on circulating or commemorative money. Bureau employees, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity to avoid professional retaliation, confirmed that bureau leadership immediately flagged significant legal and procedural barriers to senior Treasury officials, including US Treasurer Brandon Beach.

After Bureau of Engraving and Printing director Patricia Solimene pushed back against the initiative to defend existing federal law, she was abruptly reassigned to a new, lower-profile role within the agency, multiple sources confirmed to the Post.

The proposal to add Trump to the $250 bill is far from an isolated move: over the past several months, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to embed the president’s name and likeness across a wide range of national cultural and government institutions, a pattern that has drawn repeated accusations of cultivating a cult of personality around the 79-year-old commander-in-chief.

Earlier this year, the US Commission of Fine Arts, whose entire voting panel is made up of Trump appointees, unanimously approved the production of a 24-carat gold commemorative Semiquincentennial coin that includes Trump’s imagery. In recent months, two major national institutions — the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the US Institute of Peace — have been officially rebranded to add Trump’s name to their titles. Large banners bearing the president’s portrait already hang in the lobbies of the US Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture, and the State Department has confirmed that Trump’s likeness will soon be added to the inside pages of new US passports.

Formal legislation to authorize the $250 bill and change existing federal law to allow a living president’s depiction was introduced to Congress last year, but the bill has not advanced to a floor vote or committee markup and remains stalled in legislative limbo. A spokesperson for the Treasury Department offered a measured response to questions about the internal proposal, telling the Post that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is “conducting appropriate planning and due diligence” in response to the pending congressional legislation.

Democratic lawmakers have uniformly condemned the initiative, with Senate Banking Committee member Senator Mark Warner arguing that the unprecedented plan amounts to a naked power play designed only to inflate the president’s personal standing. “This is the White House blatantly stoking the president’s ego at the expense of long-held American institutional norms,” Warner said of the proposal.

At a recent policy roundtable hosted by Jamaicans for Justice at New Kingston’s Courtleigh Hotel, former Commissioner of Police and retired Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin delivered a sharp rebuke of repeated delays and excuses from Jamaica’s government and Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) leadership over the deployment of body-worn cameras for planned police operations.

Lewin opened his remarks by acknowledging the Jamaican government’s substantial $2-billion investment in boosting the JCF’s crime-fighting capacity, including plans to acquire thousands of additional body-worn cameras by 2029, a timeline first announced by Deputy Commissioner of Police Warren Clarke at the same event. He commended the government for the large-scale national security spending that has modernized the force, but made clear that progress on high-impact transparency and crime prevention tools remains unacceptably slow.

The former head of both the JCF and Jamaica Defence Force argued that closed-circuit television (CCTV) infrastructure, particularly the national JamaicaEye public surveillance program, represents the most transformative shift in Jamaican law enforcement since the adoption of police automobiles. He emphasized that the core mission of policing is not solving crime after the fact, but preventing crime from occurring in the first place. While official policing metrics often rely on case clearance rates to measure effectiveness, Lewin noted that deterrence and prevention are the true markers of success — and CCTV technology is irreplaceable for advancing that goal. He pushed for the government to prioritize expanding JamaicaEye with the same urgency it has applied to other policing priorities.

Turning to body-worn cameras, Lewin pushed back against the range of justifications officials have cited for the slow rollout, from claims the devices cannot operate in stealth mode to assertions they cannot be properly affixed to some officers’ uniforms. He dismissed these excuses as nonsensical goalpost-shifting, saying “they take us for fools” with repeated delays.

Lewin also publicly defended the Independent Commission of Investigations (Indecom), the national police oversight body that has repeatedly demanded immediate deployment of body-worn cameras across all operations, particularly those expected to involve confrontations with armed suspects. The call for expanded camera use has grown more urgent amid a sharp uptick in fatal police shootings across Jamaica.

Without body-worn camera footage, Lewin explained, Indecom is left powerless to resolve conflicting accounts of officer-involved shootings. When multiple officers provide consistent but uncorroborated statements about a shooting, and witnesses are unavailable while the suspect is killed, the oversight body has no way to independently verify what occurred. This leaves innocent officers who used force legitimately unfairly tainted by suspicion, and makes it impossible to hold officers accountable when they act outside the rules. Lewin stressed that the number of fatal police shootings is not the core issue: what matters is transparency, accountability, and verifiable proof that any use of deadly force was justified.

Lewin went a step further, claiming that ongoing resistance to rolling out body-worn cameras for planned operations betrays a “sinister purpose”. Drawing on a 2025 June 22 op-ed he published in the *Jamaica Observer* titled “Those police fatal shootings”, he argued that prolonged delays are a deliberate strategy to avoid scrutiny from international partners and advocacy groups. He acknowledged that a “ends justify the means” approach to fighting violent crime is popular among many Jamaicans who have suffered from years of rampant homicide and criminal activity, but challenged the public to consider what kind of nation it wants to be. “Is it a nation governed by laws, rules, and regulations that affect all equally, or is it acceptable to break our own laws to enforce laws and protect our people?” he asked.

Addressing rank-and-file and leadership of the JCF directly, Lewin noted that the force currently has more officers, more resources, and more highly educated, well-trained personnel than at any point in its history, with more resources promised in coming years. He urged officers to reject popular but unlawful shortcuts to crime reduction: “Criminals do not play by the rules, and that is what makes them criminals. If you play outside the rules it makes you a criminal also.” He ended by warning officers that those who praise extrajudicial tactics today will be the first to abandon them when public and political pressure mounts.