Chair­man of the To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber, Mar­tin George, is urg­ing Gov­ern­ment to re­fo­cus its en­er­gies from at­tempt­ing to host Car­ni­val events this year in Safe Zones, and to put the em­pha­sis in­stead on the ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor, the econ­o­my and bat­tling COVID-19.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment re­leased in so­cial me­dia, Mar­tin George says Gov­ern­ment should be guid­ed by the “record num­bers of COVID cas­es and the dis­in­ter­est of band­lead­ers, pro­mot­ers and per­form­ers, in such events”.

“Giv­en the push back from the per­sons who are most con­cerned with run­ning Car­ni­val events, they have in­di­cat­ed that there re­al­ly is not enough time to re­al­ly make this a fea­si­ble ven­ture,” George points out. 

“From the per­spec­tive of the To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber, this seems to re­flect the re­al­i­ty, much more than Gov­ern­ment’s idea, es­pe­cial­ly since the per­sons op­er­at­ing on the ground would be the ones best placed to know whether or not it is prac­ti­cal to host Car­ni­val this year,” he said.

Mar­tin George ob­serves that this goes dou­ble for To­ba­go, not­ing that even in the best of times, the To­ba­go Car­ni­val prod­uct of­ten pales in com­par­i­son to what ob­tains in Trinidad.

“The whole sit­u­a­tion is ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the ris­ing num­bers of COVID-19 cas­es in the coun­try,” he re­marked.  “We were warned by Dr Hinds that we would cross one thou­sand cas­es a day, and we did that yes­ter­day with 1,063 cas­es be­ing record­ed in this coun­try.  Not to men­tion that we ap­pear to be av­er­ag­ing rough­ly 15 deaths per day.”

He added: “It doesn’t seem to in­spire con­fi­dence at all in any one to try to con­tin­ue to have these events, or to push ahead with the idea.  The key stake­hold­ers—artists, band­lead­ers, en­ter­tain­ers—have come out against it.  One won­ders why Gov­ern­ment is per­sist­ing with this par­tic­u­lar agen­da when we have more im­por­tant con­sid­er­a­tions at stake.”

The To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber boss says the coun­try would be bet­ter served by fo­cussing on more fun­da­men­tal is­sues: sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery; strength­en­ing the health care sys­tem; fix­ing the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and en­sur­ing the na­tion’s chil­dren can re­turn to school safe­ly.