“The show goes on” The Nassau Guardian

Excerpt from this article; “Despite the government’s decision to withdraw its support from this year’s Bahamas Carnival, participants, spectators and the event organizers, Polantra Media, are dubbing the three-day series of events a success.

Speaking to The Nassau Guardian at a carnival concert at Clifford Park on Saturday night, Polantra Media President Trevor Davis said carnival demonstrated the organizers were able to match the previous years, when the Christie administration sponsored carnival.

‘With the attendance over the weekend, it defiantly put us in a position to have a bigger attendance next year, but from the international market, because we already started our international marketing’, Davis said.

The Minnis administration announced early in its term that it would not fund carnival.”

In early January it was reported that; “THE Minnis administration aims to completely privatize Bahamas Junkanoo Carnival (BJC) ahead of its 2018 festival, according to Culture Minister Michael Pintard, who [yesterday] stressed no government should be in the business of funding a foreign culture.”

The Bahamas government pulled out of Junkanoo Carnival but rather than scrapping it engaged private entities to take it over, who then re-branded it as “Bahamas Carnival” and by all reports did a very good job at promoting and putting together a new experience not only for Bahamians but for visitors as well; this should have been the plan from its inception, to have a festival that the people owned and were able to make profitable – giving them a stake in their own economy because the pervious Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) administration was unable to do this because while they owned it, they were just unable to make it profitable.

“The inaugural Bahamas Junkanoo Carnival in 2015 cost the Christie administration $12.9 million.

The Bahamas National Festival Commission (BNFC) reported that the 2016 carnival cost $9.8 million, of which $8.1 million was subsidized by the government.

The 2017 carnival report has yet to be released.”

While I have not come to question the figures spent in the past, it is being rumored that the organizers spent under $1 million on this year’s carnival event which just does not seem right, given the money spent on the event in the previous years as we await a report being offered up by the organizers to be made public, something that they are not obligated to do.

So Carnival lives on through the people that have come together to give it life and although many may object to it for various reasons; some on a moral basis others for the same reason that the Culture Minister gave for not funding it; “…no government should be in the business of funding a foreign culture”, a view which I also share; it [Bahamas Carnival] now belongs to the people who have already vowed to make next year’s festival bigger and better.

It is the people’s things; it is the people’s time.

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