A small so­cial me­dia-fu­elled storm erupt­ed soon af­ter en­ter­tain­er Nic­ki Mi­naj com­mis­er­at­ed with Amer­i­can Idol com­peti­tor Zoanette John­son about the chal­lenges of their child­hoods."I'm proud that this place right here gives peo­ple like you and me that came from ab­solute­ly noth­ing, from a coun­try that we prob­a­bly didn't think we would make it out alive, it gives us a shot."

Ms Mi­naj, once known as Oni­ka Maraj dur­ing her first five years of life at Bournes Road, St James, has had an un­de­ni­ably chal­leng­ing life, of­ten lever­aged to pro­mo­tion­al ad­van­tage.Na­tion­al­ists quick­ly be­gan point­ing out the dif­fer­ences be­tween this coun­try and Liberia while Ms Mi­naj's sup­port­ers quick­ly point­ed out just how specif­i­cal­ly dif­fi­cult her life ex­pe­ri­ences were in Trinidad and To­ba­go be­fore her mi­gra­tion to the Unit­ed States.

The fame that Nic­ki Mi­naj has been en­joy­ing has been a tempt­ing lure for the Gov­ern­ment. In Oc­to­ber 2010, the per­former gave a con­cert at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um that was part­ly un­der­writ­ten by the Min­istry of Sport and Youth Af­fairs.The youth out­reach ef­fort came un­der crit­i­cism from Diego Mar­tin Cen­tral MP Dr Amery Browne, who ac­cused the Sports Min­is­ter of spend­ing $900,000 on the mon­ey-los­ing event, half of the al­lo­ca­tion for youth de­vel­op­ment projects.

Her stat­ed in­ter­est in the coun­try of her birth, and per­haps her ex­pe­ri­ence at that con­cert, led her to pro­duce a Car­ni­val-flavoured video for her song Pound the Alarm, cel­e­brat­ed as a na­tion­al PR coup.Last week's com­men­tary, which par­al­leled her child­hood ex­pe­ri­ences in T&T with a Liberia still re­cov­er­ing from bloody civ­il wars, are the flip side of de­pend­ing on celebri­ties to pro­mote a na­tion­al im­age.

In No­vem­ber 2012 the singer an­nounced that a fifth of this coun­try's pop­u­la­tion had died from HIV/Aids, a fig­ure that's clos­er to 25,000. Some­body needs to brief this young woman about the coun­try of her birth, and quick­ly.Far too much of our im­age build­ing has been done on the backs of in­di­vid­u­als who by virtue of their hard work and some­times even their per­son­al mis­takes, have come to glob­al at­ten­tion.

It's a lazy and po­ten­tial­ly lethal short­cut and no re­place­ment for a prop­er­ly for­mu­lat­ed and de­signed plan to cre­ate a con­sis­tent and at­trac­tive tourism prod­uct and to pro­mote it us­ing all the myr­i­ad me­dia tools avail­able for mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the world.Nic­ki Mi­naj was nev­er a mag­ic bul­let for tourism pro­mo­tion for this coun­try, nor has the ap­point­ment of high-pro­file tourism am­bas­sadors done much for us gen­er­al­ly.

The Min­istry of Tourism and its agen­cies of ex­e­cu­tion con­tin­ue to make dan­ger­ous­ly naive as­sump­tions about the val­ue of our tourism prod­uct in a world full of na­tions ag­gres­sive­ly work­ing to pack­age their as­sets, charms and unique­ness as lures for the cu­ri­ous vis­i­tor.As the tourism sec­tor in To­ba­go gen­tly col­laps­es through lack of vis­i­tor in­ter­est, Ms Mi­naj's com­ments come as a wel­come wake-up call, a pound­ing of the alarm, as it were, that we're play­ing the fool with our tourism as­sets and it's time to stop.