By RIEL MAJOR

Tribune Staff Reporter

rmajor@tribunemedia.net

DESPITE the government reporting an increase of unemployment in Grand Bahama and Abaco after Hurricane Dorian, Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis said about 800 people have been hired recently.

Speaking to reporters at a press conference on Friday, Dr Minnis said he doesn’t know exactly how social services did their unemployment assessment in Grand Bahama, but he is waiting on the employment statistics from the Department of Statistics.

Dr Minnis said: “Yes, we would have experienced a decrease in employment and an increase in unemployment but … individuals’ jobs, facilities and everything were destroyed – but we’ve had Baker’s Bay, for example, that recently to my understanding just hired an additional 600 individuals.

“The cays, the Abaco cays, are coming back to normal very quickly and therefore there will be a lot of hiring there. The new phase of Baha Mar would have just last week hired, I think an additional 200 individuals …so we are aggressively moving forward.”

He added: “As the business sectors come on stream, we’ll have more hiring. But you would have expected after businesses were destroyed it meant that unemployment would have gone up. As businesses return, it means that unemployment will subsequently drop.”

Earlier this week, a recent assessment of Grand Bahama revealed that nearly 50 per cent of the island’s residents are unemployed following the storm.

Deputy Prime Minister Peter Turnquest said assisting entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized enterprises to reopen is the government’s goal.

Speaking to reporters outside of Cabinet on Tuesday, Mr Turnquest said he knows there have been job losses in Grand Bahama, particularly during this time period.

He said: “Businesses were not able to get back up either due to damage to their infrastructure or because of the lack of electricity or just because of the way things are in Grand Bahama at the moment.

“We do know that every day that there are people who are making steps to reopen their businesses and start to re-employ those persons who maybe have been temporarily laid off or have been terminated or made redundant as a result of the fact that their businesses had been destroyed.

“It is certainly the goal of (Ministry of) Finance and the government to assist many entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises to get back into business as quickly as possible. Hence we have put aside $10m to assist with hurricane relief efforts through either grants or capital low interest loans supported by our financial industry partners.”

He also said: “We are continuing with our small business development programme for new businesses and to provide capital for new start-ups to try to get people back into business as quickly as possible. The truth of the matter is we were on a fairly decent path to growth prior to the storm.”

Mr Turnquest said the fundamentals have not changed and it is just a matter of restarting the economy.

“Putting the support in place for those businesses that may have found themselves without insurance where they don’t have the capital to restock their inventory to replace equipment that may have been lost and so we are putting some dollars into that. Hopefully to get them back up and going,” he said.

“We’ve made…both Grand Bahama and Abaco (into) special economic zones which entitles them to duty and VAT exemptions. Again, all in an effort to get inventory back into storage, to get equipment back into business so the people can get up and going, start to re-employ people to get the economy going again as quickly as possible.