Silence on home for Carnival 2007

Seems like everyone is awaiting an answer as to where exactly will be Carnival's "home".Today's Opinion Letter to The Trinidad Express is as follows:

What, we wonder, is preventing the Government from providing a straight answer to the question: Where will Carnival be staged in 2007? Next year's Carnival dates - February 19 and 20 - are known. In fact they have been known for years, so when the Government made its declaration that this year's Carnival would be the last to be centred at the Grand Stand of the Queen's Park Savannah it must have been well aware of the time frame it had set itself, both for the demolition of the old venue and the building of a new, state-of-the-art replacement.

In fact, when Prime Minister Patrick Manning made the announcement he was dismissive of the traditional Carnival site, sneering at it as "a horse shed" and raising expectations of a bright new world for the staging of Carnival 2007's many competitions. The competitions have become integral to the Carnival celebrations although they are not essential to them, Carnival still taking place in the streets and at other venues, even if not a single official competition was to be held during the entirety of the appointed season.

Nevertheless, locals and visitors alike have become accustomed to Carnival's competitive face and, besides, the new centre was not to be a solo-use only site but one that would be used for the benefit of the entertainment communities in Trinidad and Tobago of which Trinidad and Tobago, given its population size, has a fair number. Citizens' concern over not only the Government's apparent inaction but prolonged silence on the issue is understandable.

Either the Government has the humility to inform the population that it has overshot its building bolt and cannot now accommodate a new Carnival centre or it must let us in on its plans to still break down the old and set up the new in the months that still remain, the civic proviso being that this enforced rush must not mean the country is paying more than originally budgeted.

The truth is an ongoing problem with this cash-rich but increasingly planning-poor administration which has a cavalier attitude to its own time schedules, as if time is not money and the money is not the taxpayers', even if it comes directly out of their pockets or, as in the case of the oil revenues, it comes out of those productive holes in the ground that are part of the national patrimony.