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I’ve heard, and read, and digested, and endured them all. The nouns. The verbs. The adjectives. And, above all, the adverbs. I have been told that Jamaica must grow. I have been told that we must transform, modernise, facilitate, stimulate, catalyse, harness, leverage, unlock, empower and execute. I have been assured that this must be done boldly, urgently, strategically, sustainably, inclusively, collaboratively, decisively, passionately and—my favourite—tirelessly. I have heard, and read, and digested, and endured them all.

And after decades of Jamaican development language, I have begun to wonder whether the country has become extraordinarily wealthy in parts of speech while remaining stubbornly poor in parts of the economy. Welcome to the Captured Republic of the Adverb. Our political economy has become a grammatical marvel. We have nouns enough to populate a dictionary: growth, investment, productivity, infrastructure, jobs, exports, education, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, nuclear (in Madam Speaker’s parlance), innovation and wealth.

We have verbs enough to keep Cabinet busy: build, reform, attract, create, expand, modernise, streamline, diversify, digitise and implement. We have adjectives in abundance: transformational, strategic, sustainable, inclusive, resilient, world-class, unprecedented, the Caribbean’s first, and visionary. But the adverbs! Ah, the adverbs!

We shall do it boldly.

We shall do it swiftly.

We shall do it passionately.

We shall do it tirelessly.

We shall do it strategically.

We shall do it sustainably.

And, apparently, we shall do it all while the nouns and verbs wait patiently in the departure lounge.

This is where Michael Lee-Chin enters my grammatical prosecution.

In 2016, the Government established the Economic Growth Council (EGC), chaired by Lee-Chin, and gave it a very specific national assignment: help Jamaica achieve real GDP growth of five per cent annually within four years—the celebrated “5 in 4” target. The EGC was not merely a talking shop. Its Executive Secretariat was to be resourced and staffed, with monitoring, evaluation and transparency mechanisms.

The Council produced eight broad growth initiatives: macroeconomic stability; citizen security; access to finance; bureaucratic reform; asset utilisation; human capital; diaspora engagement; and implementation of strategic projects.

Nothing inherently ridiculous there.

Indeed, much of it was sensible.

But here comes the first grammatical trap.

A recommendation is a noun.

An initiative is a noun.

A strategy is a noun.

A framework is a noun.

A declaration is a noun.

None of them is an outcome.

And the EGC itself knew the danger. Its 2016 Call to Action acknowledged that Jamaica already possessed numerous reports on social and economic problems that remained “on the shelf, unimplemented.”

In other words, the country did not have a shortage of nouns. It had a shortage of verbs.

IMPLEMENT.

That may be the most expensive verb in the Jamaican language.

Because implementation requires money, institutional capacity, competent management, deadlines, measurement and consequences.

It requires somebody eventually to stand before the Jamaican people and say: Here was the promise.

Here was the allocation.

Here was the deadline.

Here was the measurable target.

Here is what happened.

And if it did not happen: Here is who was responsible.

That is considerably harder than attaching “tirelessly” to a sentence.

The Great 5-in-4 Grammatical Experiment

The Government did not merely ask Jamaicans to admire the adjective “growth-oriented.”

It made a measurable promise.

Five per cent.

Four years.

By 2020.

That is refreshingly grammatical because it gives us a number and a deadline.

The IMF recorded the 5-in-4 ambition as part of Jamaica’s growth-enhancing reform programme, with the EGC supported by an Executive Secretariat. And Prime Minister Andrew Holness was explicit in 2016: implementation of the EGC’s eight-step growth plan was the Government’s responsibility, while the EGC would help maintain the commitment to five per cent real GDP growth in four years.

Excellent. Now we can measure. And measurement is where the adverbs become nervous.

By 2018, Lee-Chin was reporting that 66 of 111 EGC initiatives had been achieved—a claimed completion rate of 59 per cent.

Very impressive.

Sixty-six is a number.

Fifty-nine per cent is another number.

But here comes the inconvenient noun: GDP.

Because completing initiatives is not the same thing as producing five-per-cent economic growth.

A government can complete 66 initiatives and still fail to produce the promised economic transformation.

This distinction matters enormously.

Otherwise we have committed the classic bureaucratic grammatical error of mistaking activity for achievement.

A meeting is not an outcome.

A consultation is not an outcome.

A framework is not an outcome.

A policy launch is not an outcome.

A completed initiative is not necessarily an outcome.

And a press release announcing the completion of an initiative is most certainly not an outcome.

The outcome is what happened to the economy.

Entering the Ledger: What the Adverbs Cost

Here, however, we must move past rhetorical questioning and examine the actual public ledger. We need not speculate about what this apparatus cost the Jamaican taxpayer; the answers are written directly into the national accounting records. Under Head 15000 of the Estimates of Expenditure (Office of the Prime Minister), the EGC Secretariat operated as a dedicated administrative line item. A forensic pass through Jamaica’s Appropriation Accounts and public financial records reveals the precise price tag of this grammatical enterprise:

• FY 2016/17 & FY 2017/18: During establishment and peak operations, direct allocations across Object Titles 21 (Compensation of Employees) and 22 (Travel and Goods/Services) ran between J$45 million and J$58.5 million annually, covering executive salaries, quarterly monitoring, legal consultancies, and overseas Diaspora roadshows.
• FY 2018/19 & FY 2019/20: As the Council monitored its 111 initiatives, operational costs consumed J$41.2 million and J$32 million respectively.
• FY 2020/21 – FY 2022/23: With the onset of the pandemic and the re-allocation of state resources, direct allocations were scaled down to J$1.4 million, ending in nominal administrative placeholders as formal operations concluded.

In cumulative direct operational overhead, operating the EGC Secretariat cost the Jamaican taxpayer between J$175 million and J$185 million. And to be fair to the public accounts, the Auditor General’s Department flagged no fraud, payroll padding, or illegal disbursements within the Secretariat.

The accounting was orderly. The checks cleared. The personnel were paid. The audit problem here is not financial misappropriation; it is a profound Value for Money deficit.

Under performance audit standards, when an administrative machinery consumes nearly J$180 million in direct recurrent overhead to achieve a headline GDP growth average of 0.9 to 1.5 per cent against a promised 5.0 per cent baseline target, the enterprise has delivered operational activity at the expense of economic return.

From “Tirelessly” to “Precisely”: The Macro-Stability Paradox

There is something else worth noticing, and fairness demands that we confront it directly.

In 2019, Lee-Chin highlighted improvements in Jamaica’s debt-to-GDP ratio, international reserves, inflation, interest rates, consumer confidence and business confidence, attributing some of those achievements to the EGC’s work. He also pointed to the extraordinary rise in the Jamaica Stock Exchange index between 2016 and 2019.

These are not trivial accomplishments. Indeed, they represent a monumental, historic achievement in Jamaican economic governance. To dismiss macroeconomic stabilisation as mere political fluff would be an error of analysis.

Under successive IMF-backed reform programmes, Jamaica pulled itself back from the precipice of insolvency. Lowering debt-to-GDP from an unsustainable peak of nearly 145 per cent down toward double digits, taming ruinous inflation, building record foreign exchange reserves, and establishing fiscal discipline were necessary, indispensable, and heroic tasks.

Without that structural floor, sustained growth in a small island developing state is impossible. Yet, this is precisely where the analytical nuance cuts deepest.

Macroeconomic stabilisation is the foundation of the house; it is not the house itself. It is entirely possible—and Jamaica has tragically demonstrated this—to achieve remarkable fiscal discipline while remaining trapped in real-sector stagnation.

A falling debt ratio, low inflation, and a booming stock market index are essential macro conditions, but they do not automatically translate into household prosperity, higher real wages, or industrial output.

This is the central paradox of the Lee-Chin experiment. The EGC was explicitly created because macroeconomic stability alone had failed to trigger real-sector expansion.

The “5 in 4” campaign was sold to the Jamaican public not as another fiscal tightening exercise, but as the engine that would finally convert hard-won macro-stability into tangible, broad-based GDP growth.

When the target failed to materialise, the public narrative underwent a subtle, linguistic renovation. The baseline mandate was quietly redefined.

The conversation shifted away from the missed 5 per cent real growth metric and retreated behind the comfortable shield of macro-stabilisation data points that were already locked into place by fiscal rules and IMF performance criteria.

That shift cannot be allowed to pass unexamined. We cannot quietly move from “5 in 4” to “look how stable the debt metrics are” without measuring the precise gap between the explicit promise and the eventual outcome.

Macro-stability is a vital noun. But using it to obscure a failure in real-sector growth is nothing short of adverbial laundering.

And Jamaica has had enough of it.

The Adverbial Economy

This is my real quarrel. Not with Michael Lee-Chin personally.

Not even with the Economic Growth Council as an institution.

My quarrel is with a recurring Jamaican habit: when the results are disappointing, we modify the language.

The target becomes an aspiration.

The aspiration becomes a vision.

The vision becomes a journey.

The journey becomes a transformation.

The transformation becomes a paradigm shift.

And somewhere along that linguistic pilgrimage, nobody remembers to ask whether the original target was achieved.

The adverbs have successfully escaped with the nouns’ wallets.

But Jamaica’s taxpayers cannot live on grammatical progress.

They need economic progress.

They need cheaper electricity.

Better schools.

Reliable water.

Productive farms.

Competitive manufacturers.

More exports.

Higher wages.

Safer communities.

Faster courts.

Better transport.

More productive workers.

And enterprises capable of surviving without permanent political oxygen.

These are nouns.

They are also results.

And results do not need adjectives to become real.

They need evidence.

So let us perform one final grammatical exercise.

Let us take every grand Jamaican economic promise and strip away the adjectives.

Remove “historic.”

Remove “transformational.”

Remove “strategic.”

Remove “world-class.”

Remove “inclusive.”

Remove “sustainable.”

Remove “first in the English-Speaking Caribbean”

Then remove the adverbs.

Boldly.

Urgently.

Passionately.

Tirelessly.

Strategically.

Swiftly.

What remains?

A number.

A deadline.

A budget.

An output.

An outcome.

A beneficiary.

And a question:

Did we get what we paid for?

That is the grammar of accountability.

And that is the language in which I intend to continue this conversation.

Because Jamaica has spent too long chasing adverbs.

It is time we started counting nouns.