Now that the ma­jor­i­ty of re­sults are in and the dust has set­tled on Car­ni­val 2020, this me­dia house con­grat­u­lates all the ma­jor win­ners.

It is cer­tain­ly good for those who have tri­umphed to see the hard work they put in­to the sea­son cul­mi­nate in recog­ni­tion from their peers and the gen­er­al pub­lic.

It would be re­miss of us if we do not al­so con­grat­u­late Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith and his troops for keep­ing their promise of a rel­a­tive­ly safe en­vi­ron­ment dur­ing the fes­tiv­i­ties. But the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice's smooth man­age­ment of the ac­tiv­i­ty in terms of safe­ty was one of the bet­ter as­pects of the sea­son.

As we en­ter a pe­ri­od in which the na­tion­al stake­hold­er bod­ies will hold post-mortems on their 2020 Car­ni­val events, we think it is time Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion boss Win­ston Pe­ters al­so sits with some of them for hard dis­cus­sions on whether they are tru­ly get­ting it right.

The first stake­hold­er we sug­gest in this phase is the Caribbean Pres­tige Foun­da­tion, which hosts the In­ter­na­tion­al Groovy and So­ca Monarch com­pe­ti­tions. We doubt whether there is any right-think­ing cit­i­zen or tourist who has been privy to this event be­fore of course, who can tru­ly feel com­fort­able with what tran­spired at this year’s event. The show was plagued by a very late start, con­tin­u­ous tech­ni­cal prob­lems which af­fect­ed com­peti­tors and gen­er­al­ly some poor de­ci­sion mak­ing - in­clud­ing an ill-ad­vised "Zess­er" ses­sion and break­ing mid­way in­to the Groovy com­pe­ti­tion for a guest act - all of which did noth­ing to en­hance the event's im­age to the tele­vi­sion au­di­ences lo­cal­ly and abroad. The end re­sult was one of the worst pro­duc­tions in the 27-year his­to­ry of the event which would have done lit­tle to ce­ment its con­tin­u­ing claim to be the biggest show for the sea­son.

But CPF was not the on­ly trans­gres­sors this sea­son.

TU­CO's de­ci­sion to strip what was Kaiso­ra­ma of the cat­e­go­ry com­pe­ti­tions in favour of just an Ex­tem­po com­pe­ti­tion, which in it­self could not sus­tain an en­tire event, may have robbed some of the ca­lyp­so purists of what was one of the bet­ter com­pe­ti­tions of the sea­son. TU­CO may al­so have to re­vis­it its re­turn to two ca­lyp­soes in the Ca­lyp­so Monarch fi­nal, as clear­ly, based on the con­tri­bu­tions of some of the fi­nal­ists, the ca­lyp­so­ni­ans may have be­come too ac­cus­tomed to pen­ning just one good of­fer­ing each sea­son.

PanTrin­ba­go's de­ci­sion to move the Na­tion­al Panora­ma medi­um band fi­nal to To­ba­go, while note­wor­thy, al­so seemed not well thought out, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the is­sues bands faced with trans­porta­tion to and from To­ba­go and the fact that there was ef­fec­tive­ly no na­tion­al tele­vi­sion cov­er­age of the event.

Need­less to say, if the NCC is to con­tin­ue ex­pend­ing tax­pay­ers' funds on some of these ac­tiv­i­ties, it must en­sure these en­ti­ties are in fact pro­duc­ing qual­i­ty events which can open up more av­enues for rev­enue so that they be­come more self-suf­fi­cient and less de­pen­dent on the state's gen­eros­i­ty.