The “Moth­er of all Car­ni­vals” has ex­posed sev­er­al of T&T’s Car­ni­val flaws, and these mat­ters need to be ad­dressed for the in­dus­try to flour­ish.

On Fri­day, Car­ni­val band Tribe is­sued an apol­o­gy to its mas­quer­aders.

The mas band has emerged as the in­dus­try leader in terms of ser­vice since com­ing in­to op­er­a­tion in 2004, as it has over time sur­passed or pur­chased many of its com­peti­tors.

This fact was ac­knowl­edged in the apol­o­gy, stat­ing, “Af­ter 18 years in the busi­ness, we fell short of de­liv­er­ing to our usu­al stan­dard in cer­tain ar­eas and we take full re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. We sin­cere­ly apol­o­gise to those of you who were af­fect­ed.”

This apol­o­gy came af­ter sev­er­al mas­quer­aders raised con­cerns about cos­tume col­lec­tion, their cos­tumes and even the food and bev­er­ages made avail­able to them dur­ing the pa­rade of bands on Mon­day and Tues­day.

The band stat­ed it was search­ing for so­lu­tions to these is­sues and would be speak­ing with af­fect­ed mas­quer­aders to iden­ti­fy its short­com­ings. How­ev­er, Tribe ad­mit­ted that the sup­ply chain is­sues cre­at­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic se­vere­ly af­fect­ed its op­er­a­tions.

Tribe said, “To be trans­par­ent, cos­tume pro­duc­tion was grave­ly af­fect­ed by sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions which ex­tend­ed in­to the last quar­ter of 2022 caus­ing us to lose ap­prox­i­mate­ly two months of cos­tume pro­duc­tion time. We im­ple­ment­ed mit­i­gat­ing strate­gies and we be­lieved that our new time­lines would have been met.

“In the end, how­ev­er, many of the ma­te­ri­als and cos­tumes for some sec­tions were re­ceived very late, and in some cas­es just in time for pack­ing with­out our usu­al qual­i­ty-con­trol checks. This then trig­gered a se­ries of events in­clud­ing late cos­tume dis­tri­b­u­tion, that be­came over­whelm­ing for the dis­tri­b­u­tion and cus­tomer ser­vice teams in the last few days to Car­ni­val.”

How­ev­er, Tribe was not the on­ly stan­dard bear­er for Trinidad Car­ni­val that was forced to apol­o­gise to pa­trons, as a week ear­li­er Machel Mon­tano’s much an­tic­i­pat­ed One Show was met with scathing re­views from pa­trons who were left frus­trat­ed by the de­layed open­ing of gates at the venue, con­cerns about the avail­abil­i­ty of food and ul­ti­mate­ly a late start of the show.

Mon­tano and the event’s or­gan­is­ers, like Tribe is­sued an apol­o­gy. Days be­fore One Show, Kes the Band’s Izwe 2023 con­cert was al­so marred by lo­gis­ti­cal is­sues, as pa­trons were frus­trat­ed by long hours of traf­fic fol­lowed by long lines to en­ter the event.

Car­ni­val Stud­ies lec­tur­er Dr Jo-anne Tull not­ed that these lo­gis­ti­cal con­cerns were fair­ly com­mon for much of the Car­ni­val sea­son as she felt that the two-year gap had ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed the show T&T put on this year.

“How you set that up for a Car­ni­val event is very dif­fer­ent from a rock show or some­thing like that,” said Tull dur­ing a we­bi­nar en­ti­tled: “Trac­ing the Evo­lu­tion/De­vo­lu­tion of the Car­ni­val in T&T”.

“When one looks at this past Car­ni­val if we drill down on it,” said Dr Tull, “We need to go back to the draw­ing board and do train­ing in terms of the lo­gis­tics. We saw a lot of poor lo­gis­tics go­ing on. And that was be­cause of the two years. No one re­alised, that they were lack­ing mem­o­ry of the ex­pe­ri­ence and the ex­pe­ri­ence of mem­o­ry is very im­por­tant in terms of how you map out your events and that is be­cause of the na­ture of Car­ni­val.”

She said it was im­por­tant that or­gan­is­ers un­der­stood that their pre­sen­ta­tion for the event was al­so cru­cial to the over­all prod­uct that is T&T Car­ni­val.

Dur­ing the we­bi­nar, econ­o­mist Dr Mar­lene Attzs al­so not­ed there were gaps con­cern­ing the true eco­nom­ic im­pact of Car­ni­val which ul­ti­mate­ly hin­dered how plan­ning for the event could be ex­e­cut­ed. She ex­plained that be­cause of this lim­it­ed in­for­ma­tion, Car­ni­val was cur­rent­ly stuck in an un­sus­tain­able loop where it would con­stant­ly be de­pen­dent on an al­lo­ca­tion from the gov­ern­ment when in re­al­i­ty it should be self-sus­tain­ing giv­en its po­ten­tial.

“Car­ni­val for me has the po­ten­tial to be a dri­ver of eco­nom­ic growth and de­vel­op­ment in T&T and it al­so has the op­por­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide sus­tain­able em­ploy­ment it has the op­por­tu­ni­ty for earn­ing for­eign ex­change as an ex­port sec­tor and boost­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in the cre­ative sec­tor,” said Dr Attzs, who not­ed that re­search showed that there has not been a stan­dard al­lo­ca­tion for Car­ni­val over the years, yet stake­hold­ers have con­tin­u­ous­ly clam­oured for the gov­ern­ment to pro­vide fund­ing.

An ex­am­ple of such could be seen with the In­ter­na­tion­al So­ca Monarch, which was can­celled this year af­ter the gov­ern­ment opt­ed not to pro­vide $10 mil­lion in fi­nan­cial sup­port and in­stead of­fered $3 mil­lion.

Dr Attzs felt Car­ni­val was such a dy­nam­ic earn­er it should not need to re­ly on gov­ern­ment sup­port.

“There is a whole trans­mis­sion mech­a­nism, a whole mul­ti­pli­er of Car­ni­val im­pact that I think re­mains un­tapped and not stud­ied. There is a for­eign ex­change im­pact. I think it is im­por­tant for us to un­der­stand the net im­pact of Car­ni­val if we are to talk about the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of this fes­ti­val. What is the net im­pact of this fes­ti­val on T&T?” asked Attzs.

She said the in­dus­try is not grow­ing in the way it should as re­sult and is suf­fer­ing from an af­flic­tion called “Dutch dis­ease”.

Dr Attzs said, “We have not used the rev­enues that we earned from that sec­tor to de­vel­op oth­er sec­tors. That, in a nut­shell, is what we mean by Dutch dis­ease and I think our Car­ni­val sec­tor, our Car­ni­val in­dus­try has, in fact, been stymied in its growth and its sus­tain­abil­i­ty be­cause of what I put in in­vert­ed com­mas, that ‘Dutch dis­ease’ im­pact. So what we do on an an­nu­al ba­sis is we wait on a sub­ven­tion of the gov­ern­ment.”

She al­so agreed with com­ments made by Min­is­ter Allyson West years ago that the gov­ern­ment had missed out on sig­nif­i­cant rev­enues be­cause of miss­ing fi­nan­cial da­ta re­lat­ed to Car­ni­val.

“Do we ac­tu­al­ly mea­sure the in­jec­tions and do we ac­tu­al­ly mea­sure the leak­ages? There are tax­es that we are not cap­tur­ing be­cause many pri­vate per­sons in Car­ni­val, ei­ther do not pay the tax­es that are re­quired of them or we can’t ac­count for the tax­es that they earn,” said Attzs.

Dr Attzs said the last two years had al­so shown that T&T’s cre­ative sec­tor could be re­silient as they adapt­ed to the re­stric­tions im­posed as a re­sult of COVID-19.

“I think Car­ni­val ul­ti­mate­ly high­lights what our po­ten­tial is in terms of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and cre­ativ­i­ty,” she said, “Our artistes and our Car­ni­val pro­duc­ers are ac­cus­tomed to mov­ing from one coun­try to the next, that is one of the things T&T has giv­en to the world, we take our Car­ni­val to the rest of the world fol­low­ing our Car­ni­val on Mon­day and Tues­day.”

But that will­ing­ness to share with the world could come back to haunt us a lit­tle, as Dr Tull not­ed that these Car­ni­val’s mod­elled af­ter this T&T’s are be­ing mar­ket­ed in many cas­es as part of a tourism prod­uct, an area in which this coun­try falls short.

“When you look across the re­gion, much of the fes­ti­val brand­ing has tend­ed to tie brand­ing with mar­ket­ing, des­ti­na­tion mar­ket­ing, and tourism mar­ket­ing. And that is a lit­tle iron­ic in the con­text that T&T has nev­er ful­ly pre­dom­i­nate­ly pur­sued a tourism strat­e­gy,” she said.

“That is per­haps why the Ja­maica Car­ni­val, which is very much mim­ic­ked off of the Trinidad Car­ni­val has been able to suc­cess­ful­ly take off be­cause it is en­sconced al­ready in na­tion­al brand­ing strat­e­gy around tourism. It was sim­ply a mat­ter of tak­ing what we have in Port-of-Spain and just drop­ping it there lit­er­al­ly. And you will see that repli­cat­ed across the world,” Tull said.

Dr Tull, how­ev­er, high­light­ed one event which was ex­e­cut­ed well in T&T Car­ni­val this year, So­ca Brain­wash, which she said would con­tin­ue to draw for­eign­ers to the event be­cause of its ex­e­cu­tion de­spite hav­ing in­ter­na­tion­al ver­sions of the event.

She how­ev­er called on the rest of Car­ni­val stake­hold­ers to re­dis­cov­er the essence of Car­ni­val, and step up mar­ket­ing and lo­gis­tics to avoid be­ing left be­hind.

“If it is that we on­ly go in a pedan­tic way as we tend to, it is like­ly that our Moth­er of all Car­ni­vals as we call it will be over­tak­en by its chil­dren,” she said.