Senator Audrey Marks speaking at Monday morning's ceremony at which she was sworn in as minister with responsibility for efficiency, innovation and digital transformation at King's House in St Andrew. (Photo: Naphtali Junior)
Marks ready to cut red tape
New minister focused on moving Jamaica into world’s Ease of Doing Business top 5
Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness on Monday took a second step in his crusade to streamline Jamaica’s notoriously cumbersome bureaucracy by appointing newly named senator, Ambassador Audrey Marks minister with responsibility for efficiency, innovation and digital transformation.
“Minister Marks will have responsibility for streamlining processes for efficiency and economic development (SPEED), and appointing an advisory team of public sector stakeholders as she undertakes a comprehensive review of Jamaica’s governance arrangements, systems, and processes and implement targeted reforms that will eliminate inefficiencies, reduce bureaucratic delays and enhance speed of doing business,” Holness said after Marks was officially sworn at a ceremony at King’s House in St Andrew.
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Recently appointed Senator Delano Seiveright was also sworn in as minister of state in the Ministry of Tourism at the ceremony.
After the ceremony, Marks, whose tour of duty as Jamaica’s ambassador to the United States ended recently, told the Jamaica Observer that she is convinced she made the right move transitioning from a diplomat stationed overseas to becoming the lead person in Government charged with eradicating red tape and bureaucratic processes that stifle economic development.
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“I think I have made the right decision because this has been a passion in my heart to help shift this country,” said Marks who, during her tenure in Washington, DC, was also Jamaica’s permanent representative to the Organization of American States.
“My goal is to move Jamaica into the top five in the world in terms of Ease of Doing Business. There are so many things we can capitalise on. There are so many things like the many innovations available to us in banking, importing items into Jamaica, and just the way we do regular business,” said Marks, who now operates from the Office of the Prime Minister.
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Senator Marks, who founded the remittance collection and bill payments company Paymaster, said it is her hope to become an active businesswoman again in the future and therefore she was proud to be the one leading such an important thrust to make doing business in Jamaica easier.
“If I am thinking ahead, I would like to go back in business and I would like to know that I contributed to a different business environment from the one I experienced before coming into public service,” Marks told the Observer.
“It was very hard being an entrepreneur in Jamaica when I started business and was growing my business. I don’t want another young entrepreneur to go through what I went through. I know I am in the right place.
“This has been on my heart for the last two years. I was ready to come home. I am very happy that I can come home and do something that is meaningful before going back to the private sector,” Marks added.
She said that from her experience being an entrepreneur, she had been longing to see changes take place in Jamaica that would reshape how business is conducted to give people the drive to pursue their ideas.
“I find that, as a people, Jamaicans are extremely creative and we haven’t created that environment where they will take the risk to follow their dreams and their ideas. I am hoping to make the whole business climate of the country a little bit friendlier to entrepreneurs, business people, and all citizens, so we can see a dramatic shift,” she said.
Marks highlighted a personal experience when her daughter was applying for a particular document overseas, pointing out that the process was so quick and seamless she found it almost unbelievable.
“I remember my daughter was very late in getting a document from a US agency to travel and I thought I needed to call someone because we were travelling the same day. We were told that we could just go and get it done. I didn’t believe it, but when I went it was a seamless process,” she said.
The experience, she said, became seared in her memory that that was the way things must be done in Jamaica.
“It cannot be that we need to get a bly or call somebody. Most of our people don’t have anybody to call. It is a very corrupting influence when the system doesn’t work well and you have to pay off people to get things done. If we are going to shift to the next level of development as a country, we need to make things work,” Marks argued.
Holness, in his address at the ceremony, said there was no doubt that stringent fiscal policies implemented to control excessive Government spending have been working. At the same time, these layers of control have been slowing down essential approvals and delaying crucial infrastructural projects which stifle the economy and contribute to the high cost of living.
“Projects that could transform Jamaica, when it gets tied up in all kinds of processes and every part of bureaucracy wants a piece of it — whether it is investigation, counting review and all kinds of nonsense — the people suffer,” Holness said.
He pointed out that Minister Marks’s mandate will include the reform of the public investment and procurement process.
Holness also said there are other areas of Government that he intends to have reformed, such as the process of approving developments and issuing permits. This, he said, is geared towards streamlining and simplifying approval requirements to prevent major investments from being stalled in administrative limbo.
Holness said there should be a leveraging of technology for transparency and efficiency, including the use of digital platforms to modernise applications, approval, and monitoring processes and promote data sharing and automation across government agencies to reduce manual processing times and enhanced service delivery.
He also said that much of the bureaucracy Jamaicans experience can be easily replaced with the use artificial intelligence and that the Government is taking the technology very seriously.
“We need to accelerate the digitisation of government processes and services so that citizens are able to access more Government services online in the comfort of their homes, so there is no need to worry about transportation and long lines,” the prime minister said.
“Minister Marks has been a pioneer in the digital transformation space herself, having pioneered a business in this field, and I hope that she will bring the same innovative spirit and energy to drive the transformation of the Government,” he added.
Holness first signalled his intent to tackle bureaucracy in a policy address to the nation last November and reiterated the commitment at the public session of the Jamaica Labour Party’s 81st Annual Conference.
At both events he decried the crippling effects of red tape, describing how excessive compliance requirements have stymied investment, delayed infrastructure projects, and frustrated citizens.
Describing bureaucracy as a once-praiseworthy structure, Holness said that it has become a drag on national progress.
In January, at the Jamaica Stock Exchange Conference, he announced the Government’s intention to establish a Speed Task Force, an initiative that forms part of his broader ASPIRE Jamaica framework.
The task force, he said, would overhaul inefficient Government systems, improve ease of doing business, and accelerate economic growth.
