Prime Minister Andrew Holness has intensified efforts to woo anonymous Jamaicans with a $20,000 offer for them to engage with government programmes and accept and utilise the national identification system (NIDS) in the process.
Since the government is unable to legally force Jamaicans to accept the NIDS, Holness unveiled one of his latest initiatives to get Jamaicans on board during the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) 81st annual conference last weekend. He was speaking against the backdrop of the government’s CARE Programme, under which grants are given to those who are not in school or engaged in any form of training or employment.
“There’s a set of persons, however, that we have not fully captured in our CARE Giveback programme. These persons are not registered on PATH. When you walk in the campaign, we meet some of them; they are not part of our social pension system, they are not part of our NIS system, so they are just there; they are not registered, they are not known, and so they can’t take part in the CARE programme that the government is doing. I wish to announce that starting in February, we will open applications for persons 18 years and older who are not registered on PATH, not part of the social pension, not captured anywhere, or getting any benefit. They will be s
ubject to a needs assessment by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, and they will get their $20,000 cheque like everybody else, but this will also ensure that after they register, they remain on our register, that they get identification, and that we can place them permanently on PATH or permanently on the social pension, or permanently as NIS pension beneficiaries. We are going to ensure that every single Jamaican that is in need of help and assessed to be so gets the help they need from the government,” he insisted.
It is yet to be seen how many Jamaicans will accept the bribe, but what is certain is that the government is in a mad rush to meet a 2024 timeline by which the majority of Jamaicans are expected to accept the NIDS in keeping with the United Nations’ agenda.
The main financier of the NIDS is the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) through a loan agreement signed in February 2018, covering a six-year implementation period. In January 2019, Holness announced that US$68 million was the loan amount. Therese Turner-Jones, now the former General Manager, Caribbean Country Department of the IDB, announced in 2017 that the NIDS will lay the foundation for Jamaica to become a digital economy. The digital economy is the worldwide network of economic activities, commercial transactions, and professional interactions that are enabled by information and communications technology (ICT).
During the launch of the Rebuild Jamaica Initiative (RJI) following the passage of hurricane Beryl in July, Holness stated NIDS was the ideal solution to the challenge of determining the identity of citizens across Jamaica. He said this challenge was creating an issue for the delivery of relief benefits, the opening of bank accounts, the distribution of PATH (Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education) cheques, and the collection of pension.
