From all ac­counts, the 2024 To­ba­go Car­ni­val came off with­out ma­jor in­ci­dent and was brand­ed a suc­cess by the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA).

In fact, it was re­port­ed­ly such a re­sound­ing suc­cess that Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties, and Trans­porta­tion Sec­re­tary Tashia Bur­ris has hint­ed that the THA may con­sid­er ex­pand­ing the fes­tiv­i­ties to four days next year, re­port­ed­ly based on the pos­i­tive feed­back from stake­hold­ers and mas­quer­aders.

Even Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion chair­man Win­ston “Gyp­sy” Pe­ters, who was crit­i­cal of the or­gan­i­sa­tion of last year’s event, rat­ed it much bet­ter this time around—an 8.5 out of 10—say­ing it was on an up­ward tra­jec­to­ry.

This sen­ti­ment was echoed by Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell, who said he was im­pressed with how the Car­ni­val had de­vel­oped since its in­cep­tion. He ref­er­enced the par­tic­u­lar­ly high re­turns for hote­liers on the is­land this year, adding it had brought a boom to the tourism sec­tor.

Now that the dust has set­tled on the event, how­ev­er, our hope is that the THA will pro­vide the ev­i­dence to back up its claims that the event went well and was tru­ly all that it was made out to be.

This, we hope, will be done fol­low­ing a post-mortem with all the key stake­hold­ers, where there is da­ta sup­port­ing the out­comes.

For ex­am­ple, both the THA and the To­ba­go Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val As­so­ci­a­tion in­ter­im pres­i­dent Dex­ter Sandy, have claimed that be­tween 30, 000 to 37,000 vis­i­tors flocked by air and sea to the is­land for the event, which was in its third sea­son this year. Busi­ness in­ter­ests were al­so re­port­ed­ly hap­py, es­pe­cial­ly in the ar­eas of ac­com­mo­da­tion, where hote­liers and small to medi­um sized en­ti­ties re­port­ed near-max­i­mum oc­cu­pan­cy lev­els.

Yet, some of the an­nounced fig­ures do not seem to add up, with the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice re­port­ing that it pro­vid­ed se­cu­ri­ty for just over 8,000 rev­ellers over the two days of ac­tu­al mas­querad­ing. So, does this mean that some 22,000 vis­i­tors were in To­ba­go for ac­tiv­i­ties that were un­re­lat­ed to the ac­tu­al high point of the Car­ni­val?

Pro­gres­sive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Pa­tri­ots leader Wat­son Duke has al­ready chal­lenged some of the num­bers pro­vid­ed. Fo­cus­ing on the ac­com­mo­da­tion sec­tor, he has not­ed the is­land has not ad­vanced much past the 5,000-room stock fea­tured in a 2016-2017 Ox­ford Busi­ness Group re­port. Nat­u­ral­ly, he has asked the THA to ac­count for where the over 20,000 vis­i­tors would have stayed. Point­ing to the fact that the bud­gets for the last three Car­ni­vals have dropped from $17.5 mil­lion in the first year to $9 mil­lion this year, Duke has al­so ar­gued that even with the sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion, the THA and Gov­ern­ment by ex­ten­sion, can­not af­ford to waste mon­ey on en­deav­ours which do not ful­ly ben­e­fit the cit­i­zens.

Fol­low­ing on this, there­fore, we hope the THA will do its due dili­gence and pro­vide the de­tails to match its boast of suc­cess af­ter this year’s Car­ni­val, com­pared to the pre­vi­ous two in­stall­ments.

Sim­ply put, the State can­not af­ford to con­tin­ue bankrolling an ac­tiv­i­ty which is not sus­tain­able across the board.

As such, we await Sec­re­tary Bur­ris’ full ac­count to the pub­lic on the true num­bers be­hind this year’s event, as well as her re­veal of a sol­id eco­nom­ic blue­print on the way for­ward.