Bowe critical of Economic Recovery Committee’s summary report

Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity Bank and Trust International Ltd. Gowon Bowe said yesterday that the Economic Recovery Committee’s (ERC) recently released summary report seems to be a set of goals with no actual plan to achieve them yet.

Bowe, who was a guest speaker at the Bahamas Institute of Chartered Accountants’ (BICA) Accountants Week seminar, said now that the country has the ERC’s conceptual framework, “What’s the timeline on the actual plan and strategy that is going to come behind it?”

Bowe contended that the messaging accompanying the report needs to be clarified in order to manage the expectation of Bahamians.

“We have to get the message right as to what the report is, because I think that gets confused,” said Bowe.

“At its inception, the committee was deemed to be revolutionary and it was going to have immediate actions and plans that were going to right the ship, given the state of the economy at the time, going into the pandemic; and a lot of the recommendations that have come out of it have proved one thing, that in reality there is no such thing as a plan to respond to COVID-19.”

He said what the country needs right now is a plan that has milestones and measurable elements that show if the measures put in place are on the right course.

“What the report tries to do is draw out those elements that have been spoken about for many years. A large number of them were included in an exercise started a number of years ago in the National Development Plan,” Bowe said.

“I think the report, while it has been given the caveat that it is a summary report, is the only document that has been published and the question is, if this was only the conceptual framework, then what’s the timeline on the actual plan and strategy that is going to come behind it?”

Bowe said the summary report does not offer things such as key performance indicators or specific steps for implementing some of the recommendations.

Vice President of Investments at CFAL Pamela Musgrove-Ferguson, who was also a panelist at the BICA event, said Bahamians are often good at recommending, but bad at executing for future development and growth. 

“I felt that time could have been better spent looking at the National Development Plan, pulling some areas out of that plan and then creating a framework for execution from that plan,” said Musgrove-Ferguson. 

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/bowe-critical-of-economic-recovery-committees-summary-report/