Benjamin says $137M Carnival budget well spent

DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­[email protected]

Cul­ture Min­is­ter Michelle Ben­jamin yes­ter­day de­clared Car­ni­val 2026 a suc­cess, cit­ing vis­i­tor ar­rivals, job cre­ation and strong at­ten­dance at events.

Ac­cord­ing to Ben­jamin, the Min­istry of Cul­ture spent $137 mil­lion on the sea­son, mon­ey she de­scribed as “well spent.” She said more than 37,000 vis­i­tors en­tered the coun­try, ho­tels in Port-of-Spain op­er­at­ed at ca­pac­i­ty, and more than 2,000 jobs were cre­at­ed, in­clud­ing 147 di­rect jobs, over 400 road mar­shals, 200 ush­ers and 83 com­pli­ance of­fi­cers.

She said an es­ti­mat­ed 200,000 pa­trons al­so at­tend­ed the Fla­va Vil­lage at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, which will close on Feb­ru­ary 28 and re­turn next year. Machel Mon­day drew about 20,000 pa­trons to the vil­lage on Fan­tas­tic Fri­day, while an­oth­er ma­jor night record­ed 13,000 at­ten­dees. At­ten­dance fig­ures al­so in­clud­ed more than 12,000 pa­trons at the Panora­ma se­mi-fi­nals and over 13,000 at Ju­nior Panora­ma.

The min­istry re­ceived 411 ven­dor ap­pli­ca­tions but ap­proved 211, she said, adding they in­tend to ex­pand ca­pac­i­ty next year. More than $6 mil­lion was in­vest­ed in re­gion­al Car­ni­val events and $3.2m al­lo­cat­ed to safe­ty mea­sures.

Ben­jamin said a de­tailed break­down of the $137m ex­pen­di­ture will be pro­vid­ed in about a month.

“Of course, that break­down will be pro­vid­ed,” she said, adding that when she as­sumed of­fice, she found that most of the Car­ni­val fund­ing went to­wards in­fra­struc­ture.

She ar­gued that ini­tia­tives such as Fla­va Vil­lage were de­signed to broad­en ac­cess for small­er ven­dors and in­crease earn­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for artistes.

“Artistes saw more book­ings be­cause of Fla­va. Some artistes, they will have songs and they don’t even get it played on the ra­dio,” she said.

Ben­jamin al­so al­leged that in pre­vi­ous years, large sums, in­clud­ing a $100M con­tract linked to in­fra­struc­ture such as the North Stand, went to con­trac­tors, and sug­gest­ed that en­trenched in­ter­ests had re­sist­ed change.

“Some­times we have no choice, es­pe­cial­ly for the first year, in do­ing things more than to ex­e­cute as you would have met on the books. Be­cause when you try to in­sti­tute any sort of change, which I would have tried in this Car­ni­val, to fur­ther give it back to the peo­ple, you will see cer­tain push-back. And push­back from op­po­si­tion mem­bers that know what they have left in train is a eat­ing fren­zy from their friends and fam­i­ly and con­trac­tors.”

“That would be in­ter­rupt­ed in 2027,” she said, pledg­ing greater trans­paren­cy so that cit­i­zens will know how Car­ni­val funds are spent and en­sur­ing “that the artistes earn.”

She said plan­ning meet­ings for fu­ture Car­ni­vals will be­gin as ear­ly as to­day, with broad­er stake­hold­er con­sul­ta­tions start­ing in April for Car­ni­val 2027.

“It is very sad that artistes, most of my artistes, they are not do­ing well. And some, when they reach in their lat­er years—so I have to do bet­ter. And that is the man­date of this Gov­ern­ment.”