Pe­ter Christo­pher

Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine has again said To­ba­go is look­ing for­ward to its own Car­ni­val and is not com­pet­ing with Trinidad’s event.

He made the com­ment in an in­ter­view fol­low­ing the of­fi­cial han­dover of the Man­ta Lodge ho­tel from Ude­cott to the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly yes­ter­day.

To­ba­go host­ed its first in­di­vid­ual Car­ni­val in Oc­to­ber last year but al­so staged fes­tiv­i­ties in tan­dem with the na­tion­al Car­ni­val this month.

Asked about the low at­ten­dance num­bers in the just con­clud­ed Car­ni­val events in To­ba­go, Au­gus­tine said he was not wor­ried. He not­ed, how­ev­er, that there had al­so been re­ports of few­er spec­ta­tors at Car­ni­val events across both Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“In terms of spec­ta­tor­ship, I saw an ar­ti­cle on Guardian Me­dia up to to­day speak­ing about the ab­sence of spec­ta­tor­ship even in Trinidad, so na­tion­al­ly, peo­ple didn’t re­al­ly come out to watch the events. So, it is not a To­ba­go thing,” said Au­gus­tine, who al­so not­ed there had been a long-stand­ing trend of To­bag­o­ni­ans head­ing to Trinidad for the pe­ri­od, with most of To­ba­go’s Car­ni­val fra­ter­ni­ty stat­ing their pri­or­i­ty is now with To­ba­go’s Car­ni­val in Oc­to­ber.

“I made that very clear that To­ba­go is tran­si­tion­ing. And so, I did ex­pect a much more low-key Car­ni­val this Feb­ru­ary than we did in Oc­to­ber last year,” he said.

“A lot of the band­lead­ers, they pre­fer to wait on Oc­to­ber to do their mas and so on so be­cause we are not com­pet­ing. And, of course, you would have no­ticed that sev­er­al To­bag­o­ni­ans de­cid­ed to go to Trinidad and play mas. This has been the case for many, many years.”

Au­gus­tine al­so said the con­cerns about the re­ceipt of the $1.3 mil­lion al­lo­ca­tion by Car­ni­val stake­hold­ers were al­so not un­usu­al, as he said it reg­u­lar­ly was not paid out be­fore the event.

“If you no­tice, in pre­vi­ous years, as is this year, you don’t get all of your al­lo­ca­tions ahead of the event. Be­cause part of the al­lo­ca­tion in­cludes pay­ing the prizes, so that is an is­sue,” said Au­gus­tine.

Au­gus­tine ex­plained that he even sent mar­ket­ing teams to Trinidad to pro­mote To­ba­go dur­ing the fes­ti­val.

“We are work­ing so hard in terms of how we mar­ket the is­land. That’s why for even this Car­ni­val, we had work­ers forego their own Car­ni­val to be in Trinidad to set up booths at every ma­jor event in Trinidad,” he said Au­gus­tine, who ex­plained this in­clud­ed hav­ing To­ba­go fea­tured among the spon­sors for the Pa­rade of Bands broad­cast from the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah on Mon­day and Tues­day.

“The pur­pose of that is so that we can di­rect­ly com­pete with oth­er is­lands like St Lu­cia and Grena­da that were, in fact, there in Trinidad mar­ket­ing their is­lands. We were there do­ing the same thing, that not just the do­mes­tic mar­ket but the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket un­der­stands that there is an­oth­er part of the coun­try, per­haps the more beau­ti­ful part of the coun­try, that they can come to for a dif­fer­ent kind of en­ter­tain­ment and dif­fer­ent kind of re­lax­ation,” he said of the mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy.