The Governor, after conferring with Leader of Government Business Kurt Tibbetts, announced on Monday that Cayman’s two hurricane recovery organisations, the National Recovery Fund and the Housing Recovery Grant, were being combined into one entity.
The move makes sense for a lot of reasons.
In practice, National Recovery Fund activities will now more closely resemble that of the Housing Recovery Grant, which was administered by the Cayman Islands Development Bank.
The CIDB will now be able to concentrate on the lending aspect of hurricane recovery, which is more within its original mandate.
There has been confusion among some Caymanians with hurricane-related needs in regard to which recovery scheme they should contact.
Having two schemes also caused some duplication of effort. A single entity will help streamline the process.
For a variety of possible reasons, neither of the previous entities were able to help as many people as they would have liked.
A shortage of funding, through donations here and overseas, has contributed to the problem.
Some suggested the donation process became politicised, preventing some local philanthropists and good corporate citizens from donating to the funds.
One of the reasons Mr. Tibbetts wanted to see the re-structuring of the two schemes was to eliminate perceptions that the Fund had political connections.
To his credit, at the press conference to announce the Recovery Fund restructuring, Mr. Tibbetts refused to be drawn into accusing the previous administration of responsibility for lagging donations.
Mr. Tibbetts responded to such suggestions by saying this issue wasn’t about the past, it was about helping people.
There are still Caymanians in real and serious need as a result of Hurricane Ivan, and they need help from anyone in a position to assist.
The inability to help these people is a failure of everyone in society, no matter where they stand in the political landscape.
If we’re looking for someone to blame for the problem, we should be looking in the mirror rather than pointing a finger at opposing political forces.
If Cayman is to recover fully and move past the hardships caused by Ivan, this society needs to pull together to help everyone who is still suffering as a result of the hurricane.
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