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Friday, May 2, 2025

Dookeran and team barred from NAPA

by

20100319

Mem­bers of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) were de­nied ac­cess to the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA) in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day. Some mem­bers of the COP, led by po­lit­i­cal leader Win­ston Dook­er­an, as­sem­bled out­side NA­PA around 11 am to tour the fa­cil­i­ty. But as the group tried to en­ter the fa­cil­i­ty they were quick­ly con­front­ed by a group of se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers, led by the head of Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) se­cu­ri­ty Ben Ram­nar­ine. COP ac­tivist Anil Roberts said the par­ty sent a let­ter ask­ing to tour the fa­cil­i­ty, but did not re­ceive a re­sponse.

Ram­nar­ine in­formed them that their re­quest was not ap­proved.

He said a let­ter was faxed to the COP of­fice, stat­ing that they would re­ceive an an­swer by March 23. Dook­er­an said: "We came to tour the fa­cil­i­ty to see whether cit­i­zens were get­ting val­ue for mon­ey." He added that this came in light of the re­cent con­cerns ex­pressed by the Artists Coali­tion of T&T (ACTT) that NA­PA was not func­tion­al for lo­cal artists and cit­i­zens were not get­ting val­ue for mon­ey. "We want to see it our­selves, right now we are giv­ing them the ben­e­fit of the doubt un­til we get the op­por­tu­ni­ty to tour the fa­cil­i­ty...We want to find out if it is a white ele­phant," Dook­er­an said.

He added that they want­ed to de­ter­mine whether it was fact or fic­tion con­cern­ing the func­tion­al­i­ty of the place and if it would be a bur­den on the Trea­sury. He said the peo­ple had a right to in­for­ma­tion and was call­ing on the Cul­ture Min­is­ter to ad­dress the con­cerns raised. Roberts said the par­ty had writ­ten to the Com­mu­ni­ty, Cul­ture and Gen­ders Af­fairs Min­istry, Queen's Hall board and UTT, re­quest­ing per­mis­sion to tour the fa­cil­i­ty. He said they had writ­ten to the three or­gan­i­sa­tions as they were un­cer­tain as to which one had the au­thor­i­ty.

Based on the re­port by ACTT, Roberts high­light­ed some of the flaws at NA­PA, say­ing that the doors were small­er than the re­quired spec­i­fi­ca­tions for artistes who had equip­ment, no out­side stage for out­side cul­tur­al events, and a small­er stage was al­so re­quired. He said the out­dat­ed ana­log sys­tems in­stalled was use­less and the Gov­ern­ment should have con­sid­ered mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy such as a dig­i­talised sys­tem.

He added JW and Blaze were al­so de­nied per­mis­sion to film their Road March hit Palance in front the fa­cil­i­ty. How­ev­er, so­ca artist Neil Iw­er George, ca­lyp­son­ian D Orig­i­nal De Fos­to (Win­ston Scar­borogh) and chut­ney singer Ravi B came un­der fire by Roberts for go­ing against the ACTT and prais­ing the Gov­ern­ment for the "won­der­ful" fa­cil­i­ty. Roberts chal­lenged the three artistes to host their own show with­out any kind of sub­sidi­s­a­tion and prove to the pub­lic that it can be eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able.


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