Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

A Car­ni­val con­sul­ta­tion in Scar­bor­ough on Thurs­day night brought a clear mes­sage that To­ba­go’s Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val needs bet­ter plan­ning, stronger poli­cies, and ear­li­er ex­e­cu­tion.

Stake­hold­ers said they were al­ready spend­ing big with­out clear sig­nals or struc­ture from the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly.

Dex­ter Sandy, pres­i­dent of the To­ba­go Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val As­so­ci­a­tion, said or­gan­is­ers could not af­ford to re­peat the mis­takes of pre­vi­ous years. He point­ed to poor co-or­di­na­tion be­tween events, clash­es with the pa­rade, and a lack of in­fra­struc­ture to prop­er­ly show­case mas.

“I know in Oc­to­ber was born, it was all about putting mas in the road, look­ing good, so we can bring vis­i­tors to the is­land,” Sandy said dur­ing Wednes­day night’s con­sul­ta­tion. “But I think we have kind of achieved a high per­cent­age of that so far. So now it’s to kind of fine tune it and make sure that the cul­tur­al ex­pres­sions—the ca­lyp­so, the tra­di­tion­al, the old mas, the pan—right? I mean, pan kind of al­ready in­te­grat­ed in it, but I re­al­ly want us to make sure we don’t lose the essence.”

Tourism of­fi­cials present at the con­sul­ta­tion ac­knowl­edged the is­sues and agreed that stronger struc­tures must be put in place. Ac­cord­ing to As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary Niall George, the Di­vi­sion of Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties and Trans­port is work­ing on a new pol­i­cy frame­work to guide both na­tion­al and Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val.

“We have a time­line for our con­sul­ta­tions, which would be three months,” George said.

“And it is the aim to make sure that poli­cies that guide both na­tion­al Car­ni­val and Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val—we de­fine what they are, de­fine what we need to be done, the tra­di­tion­al el­e­ments of the Car­ni­val that are not in Oc­to­ber. (Which is) why miss la­dy would call it a bor­ough. We un­der­stand that it needs to be in­cor­po­rat­ed.”

George al­so said he ex­pects a larg­er turnout for this year’s event and en­cour­aged all in­ter­est­ed groups to con­tin­ue par­tic­i­pat­ing in the con­sul­ta­tions.

The next con­sul­ta­tion is sched­uled for next week in East To­ba­go.

Stake­hold­ers say they will keep show­ing up, but they want to see change.

The 2025 To­ba­go Car­ni­val is sched­uled for Oc­to­ber 24–26.