The most note­wor­thy ad­min­is­tra­tive-cum-man­age­ment as­pect of the Car­ni­val had to do with the Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Bands As­so­ci­a­tion (NC­BA) tak­ing the ini­tial de­ci­sion to dis­qual­i­fy the band Tribe for dis­obey­ing the route rules in that it went up Fred­er­ick Street, notwith­stand­ing the firm stip­u­la­tion that that was not to be.

And al­though the NC­BA soft­ened its po­si­tion lat­er on Tues­day and de­cid­ed to give the mas­quer­aders a chance to prance across the stage, an of­fer re­ject­ed, hope­ful­ly the mes­sage was re­ceived that band­lead­ers can­not ex­pect to make rules about mat­ters such as the pa­rade route and then break them. Man­ag­ing the flow of bands on the road to the stages is ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult. The re­al­i­ty is that when Bai­ley and Salde­nah brought big mas in the 1960s, the size of those bands num­bered no more that 800 to 1,000 mas­quer­aders. To­day's com­par­a­tive bands reach over 5,000. More­over, then there were half dozen large bands. To­day the num­bers have dou­bled.

In ad­di­tion to the far larg­er num­bers of mas­quer­aders in cos­tume, the num­ber of spec­ta­tors on the road has quadru­pled. While those phe­nom­e­nal par­tic­i­pa­tion rates have been dou­bling, the mas-play­ing routes have been ex­pand­ed on­ly mar­gin­al­ly. These are the hard facts that have cre­at­ed con­ges­tion that re­sults in mas­quer­aders lin­ing up for hours to get on stage. The Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion (NCC), the NC­BA and the Min­istry of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism must con­tem­plate fun­da­men­tal change. Par­tic­i­pa­tion in the "Great­est Show on Earth" will be­come in­creas­ing­ly less at­trac­tive to na­tion­als and those who come in from abroad with­out a free flow of bands on the road.

A sec­ond im­por­tant de­ci­sion was that of the Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so­ni­ans Or­gan­i­sa­tion (TU­CO) to find the ex­tra $500,000 to make the mil­lion-dol­lar purse de­mand­ed by ca­lyp­so­ni­ans for their per­for­mance in Di­manche Gras. No in­for­ma­tion has been giv­en as to where the ad­di­tion­al fund­ing came from but the as­sump­tion must be that TU­CO took it out of the $7 mil­lion grant from the Gov­ern­ment or the or­gan­i­sa­tion was able to at­tract a spon­sor at the last mo­ment to ward off the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a boy­cott of the com­pe­ti­tion by at least sev­en of the ca­lyp­so­ni­ans.

What was good about the TU­CO ini­tia­tive is that the or­gan­i­sa­tion did not pine or belly­ache about the im­por­tance of ca­lyp­so and cry croc­o­dile tears about no one, in­clud­ing the Gov­ern­ment, car­ing about the art form. TU­CO must ma­ture to the point where it un­der­stands that it must add to the gov­ern­ment grant it re­ceives and be­come proac­tive with the prod­uct it sells. It must earn rev­enue from the shows it puts on. TU­CO, Pan Trin­ba­go, the NC­BA, the NCC and the oth­er in­ter­est groups have to be­come proac­tive and break the de­pen­dence for every­thing on the Gov­ern­ment; and some­one needs to dri­ve home that mes­sage.

For yet an­oth­er year the po­lice have worked hard at re­duc­ing crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties on the two days of the street pa­rade. This achieve­ment goes back a decade or so and po­ten­tial of­fend­ers have come to know that they will spend the time in prison if caught break­ing the law. For­mer Miss Uni­verse, Wendy Fitzwilliam, made the very good sug­ges­tion of ex­pand­ing the ar­eas for the Road March to be judged to in­clude dif­fer­ent parts of the pa­rade route. The fact is the present sys­tem for judg­ing the most pop­u­lar tune on the road has be­come reg­i­ment­ed and open to ma­nip­u­la­tion; it's no longer a road march but a stage prance.

Spe­cial recog­ni­tion must be giv­en to Cepep con­trac­tors and work­ers for do­ing such an ef­fi­cient job of clear­ing and clean­ing the streets of Port-of-Spain so that the stranger com­ing to town on Ash Wednes­day morn­ing would not have been able to con­ceive what tran­spired on the two days be­fore.