At first I thought it was a misreport but then, Minister Lincoln Douglas denied it and confirmed it simultaneously last week: Three hundred and fourteen million dollars for the NCC! And they'd asked for $500 million. (This must be what the Government means by "cutting back.")
I recall late last year the NCC or ministry taking out a full-page ad boasting they'd cut the Carnival spending down to $170-something million, from over $200 million the previous year. Now, with the $150 million deficit brought over, it appears that Carnival 2014 cost closer to $300 million last year. And with this year's anticipated deficit, well, you get the picture.
Three hundred million! And arts organisations I know already bawling because their subventions or grants or whatever have been cut, or just disappeared, while the gubbament simply hands over a pile of money to those brigands to wine down on. What does the NCC think it is, Parliament? With a social reality like this, you're encouraging people to use their creativity to find ways to tief.
Now the tired old questions–where does the money go? And does any come back? The number of people who believe that Carnival makes money seems to be growing because of the confident statements from all involved, but no evidence. The Honourable PM herself threw out the $1 billion figure in returns a couple of years ago, and Carnival enthusiasts have been thrilled to repeat it.
The official data on this whole "Carnival makes money thing" came latterly from Dr Keith Nurse of UWI. He first floated this idea in a paper in 2002 at a conference at Warwick University, and published it in the collection Globalisation, Diaspora and Popular Culture in 2005.
(This is the sort of good news international academics and multilateral agencies love to hear: the natives are fine, no guilt about the chaos artificial international financial crises, bad policies, and institutional racism wreak on the developing world.)
Last year was an announcement that an economist of note had been hired to do the math to see what the Carnival actually made, if anything, to end vicious rumours that the people saying that Carnival made a profit were lying louts and hustlers. No more has been heard about that report, and my inquiries revealed that the process, if it ever started, was stopped, coincident with the erstwhile NCC chairman's departure.
Interestingly, another study by the Ministry for Arts and Multiculturalism (reported in the Newsday last Sept 28), said that more people left the country than the number that came in for Carnival. I found the report, Towards Improvement and Excellence:
Report on Carnival Observations 2012-2014, on the ministry Web site, but could not find the bit about people leaving. The account of the economics of the festival (p 96), was inadequate but words like "delusional" and "massive economic losses" were used to describe the performance, if accompanied by few actual numbers.
More on this report in future columns, but to get back to the point: Carnival and profit? It seems logical–billions of people come for Carnival, hotels, food vendors, taxis, car rentals. But no one looks at the cost (as opposed to just revenue), which as I understand the issue, is kind of important in determining profit.
First of all, the calculable costs: strain on the health, police, and general utilities. In these days of forex woes, does foreign exchange outflow at least equal inflow? What about the fact that many Carnival "tourists" are returning nationals, who stay with relatives. Then there are calculable but uncalculated costs, like productivity. The country shuts down completely for a week (Carnival Monday to Friday), and partially the week before.
Then health (pregnancies, STDs, woundings) and increased stress generally manifest in communities going to court to stop massive, stress-generating, noise-torture fetes? Which leads to an intangible costs, also known as social capital. The argument runs that Carnival is a pressure valve, releasing pent-up energy and stress. So why do more people leave than come in the country?
Why do more people stay home than participate? Furthermore, no Trini economist has done any study on social capital, but the World Bank did, and found that we had the least or second least in the Caribbean. (So much for all o' we is one.)
The one or two followers of this column might realise that these arguments have been made many times in this space. I repeat them on the off chance that they might penetrate some concrete skull. The point is, that there's no actual proof that Carnival makes a profit when even simple costs and revenue are analysed, far less the wider definitions of capital.
What Carnival resembles is a massive state welfare trough at best, or an Orwellian "hate week" at worst. "Hate" might not be a word many people associate with Carnival, but the mass, if not the whole population is emotionally illiterate, and cannot distinguish among animus, unhealthy excitement, and happiness.
This isn't helped by a state–and church-sanctioned good time here including mass drunkenness, making an unbelievable amount of destructive noise, crude sexual imprecations, a spot of sexual assault if the opportunity arises, crass conspicuous consumption and spitting violence at the world at large.
And so on, and so on. But don't let fact, logic and common sense spoil a good time. I guess the masses need something to forget the child abuse, crime, road rage, stress, public and private thievery on an Olympian scale, and the general fragility of everyday life. Carnival beats actually confronting or solving those problems.