Kaiso left to suffer

NEWS late Tuesday evening that both the National Calypso Monarch and the Extempo Monarch competitions have been cancelled, will not only seriously diminish an already watered-down Carnival, it also leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of calypsonians and all who love and cherish TT's kaiso art form.

Nobody should be surprised at this sorry turn of events. The calypso and Carnival entities have been at loggerheads over the past few weeks over the issue of money.

The Trinbago Unified Calypsonians Organisation (TUCO) was adamant it could not manage its Taste of Carnival schedule, including the staging of the two première kaiso competitions, on the $1.5 million budget given to it by the National Carnival Commission (NCC).

In the end, despite days of intense closed-door meetings between TUCO and the NCC, the two competitions could not be salvaged and an important component of TT Carnival will be missing this year.

The warning signs were there since last Friday when the preliminary round of the Calypso Monarch competition was postponed although 15 calypsonians had already performed. The move came after TUCO president Ainsley King met with the NCC that same day.

“We decided to stop and postpone the prelims so we could continue negotiations,” Mr King said.

The NCC had put aside $1.5 million for calypso from its $15 million Taste of Carnival budget, but the kaiso group wanted $2.5 million.

Government’s very last-minute approval of funding for Carnival is by no stretch of the imagination ideal. It is obvious that stakeholders did not have as much time as they might have had otherwise to properly organise.

The divergence of views over funding shows that both TUCO and the NCC have not been doing a good job of working together to protect the interests of one of our key national art forms and the people central to it: calypsonians. There is no better demonstration of that than what happened on Tuesday when news broke of the cancellation of both kaiso competitions.

There was optimism, even at this late stage, that the competitions could still be salvaged, especially after NCC chairman Winston "Gypsy" Peters was on record as insisting that both competitions would go forward, come what may.

His tune was deemed off-key by TUCO, with Mr King even questioning who was really in charge of the calypso organisation, the current executive which he leads, or Gypsy and the NCC?

In the end, the competitions were cancelled and Carnival and TT's culture has been left to suffer. Both the NCC and TUCO must shoulder blame for this sorry state of affairs.

Both entities should have anticipated funding cuts and late approvals and should have had contingency plans in place to reflect the fact that this two-year-old pandemic has demonstrated just how unpredictable and fast-changing things are.

One can only hope that, at the very least, those in charge of TT's culture will learn one important lesson from this fiasco – life is about change and those who cannot adapt will fall.