The Tribune

By ADRIAN GIBSON

THOUGH the governing Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) is not likely to scrap the Bahamas Junkanoo Carnival (BJC) any time soon, this is one programme that deserves a stiff dose of stop, review and cancel.

One year later, I still view this incarnation of carnival - imported from Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago and elsewhere and centred heavily upon soca music - as a mistake that can only be likened to a forced ripe dilly.

Carnival 2016 ought to have been an example of fiscal and administrative behaviour that is informed by the lessons learnt last year. If we say that Carnival 2015 was a teachable moment having cost nearly $12m for a glorified party, one would then think that 2016 should be a study of how to get it right.

Instead, they are late again, there is political incorrectness and what appears to be a planned national wastage.

Last week, the Bahamas National Festival Commission (BNFC) revealed that its performance lineup for the Nassau leg of this year’s BJC includes Trinidadian soca queen Destra, Grammy award winning Haitian hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean and Jamaican reggae star Tarrus Riley. The three will be the so-called headliners at the festival, which runs in New Providence from May 5 to 7.

One day later, BNFC Chairman Paul Major announced that the government will spend about $7m to host this year’s Junkanoo Carnival. He said the artists would be paid at their international market rate: about $30,000 for Destra and about $70,000 for Wyclef Jean.

Not long before that, Minister of Tourism Obie Wilchcombe - whose ministry has charge of the carnival - was reported as estimating that the fete would cost about $3m. So, where did the other $4m come from? Can the Commission please provide us with an itemised list of expenses and payments already issued?

Wyclef has, recently, been mired in controversy surrounding his Yele Haiti Foundation. According to the UK Guardian, Yele Haiti became “one of the most prominent aid groups in the aftermath of the 12 January (2010) earthquake that killed as many as 200,000 people in and around Port-au-Prince.” In responding to allegations that the Yele Haiti Foundation mismanaged donations, Mr Jean admitted that the charity had “made mistakes”.

According to a UK Daily Mail report, Yele had shuttered its doors “amid allegations of fraud and mounting debt”.

“The collapse of the organisation once labelled by its founder as Haiti’s ‘greatest asset and ally’ comes after years of accusations of mishandled funds totalling $16 million,” the Daily Mail reported. “The group, which the Haitian-born Jean stated in 2004, was small in its first years of operation, with assets amounting to only $37,000, but according to the New York Times, after the devastating 2010 earthquake, donations started pouring in. Jean said he raised $1 million in 24 hours after issuing a plea for help on Twitter. But rather than using the money to help the millions of displaced residents living on the quake-ravaged streets of Port-au-Prince, the Times reported that Yele funneled a large portion of the funds to pay for ‘offices, salaries, consultants’ fees and travel’ to say nothing of Jean’s family, friends and legal team.”

According to that report, Yele “shelled out $30,763 to fly Hollywood starlet Lindsay Lohan from New Jersey to a charity event in Chicago that raised $66,000 ... Following the earthquake, Yele spent $9 million of its $16 million on office space, workers’ salaries and other expenses ... About $600,000 in donations went toward Yele’s headquarters, which have since been abandoned; another $375,000 was used to cover ‘landscaping’ costs; and more than $470,000 was spent on food and beverages ... According to The Smoking Gun, the charity also made payments of more than $100,000 to the alleged mistress of the married 42-year-old singer ... As for Yele’s much-hyped revitalisation plans, many of them never got off the ground. The group paid $146,000 to build a medical centre inside geodesic domes and another $93,000 to erect temporary housing, but neither project was completed.”

What’s of note is the fact that Wyclef, though the Attorney General of New York offered him and two other Yele founders to pay $600,000 in restitution ‘to remedy the waste of the foundation’s assets’, has not accepted the settlement and instead referred the matter to his lawyers.

Notwithstanding Wyclef’s commercial success with the Fugees, aren’t we concerned about the impression that would be left on impressionable minds when we invite the figurehead of the alleged regional mismanagement of donated funds to Haitian earthquake victims to be one of the BJC’s headliners?

Are the organisers of the view that Mr Jean would attract Haitians and Bahamians of Haitian heritage to the carnival site?

We have a government that is saddled with recurrent allegations of corruption and which has been unable to account for the money spent on carnival 2015 engaging a headliner who has allegedly not accounted for the monies donated to a charitable foundation he once headed. Is anyone else seeing the metaphorical significance of that? Just as Mr Jean was asked where is the money, we too can now ask the government the very same question.

Interestingly, only $20,000 was allocated for participants in the song competition. Sammie Starr won last year and the government took forever to pay the contestant. I also heard pledges of a record deal and international exposure, but if one was to speak to Sammie, he would likely have a far different story to tell. Even more, the artists had to run behind the government to get paid, some refusing to speak to the media for fear of retribution.

This year, Destra (and I like a few of her songs) and Wyclef (love his Fugees and early 2000s records) are being grossly overpaid.

I have spoken to friends in the music industry. I once dabbled in promotion and event organisation, from boat cruises to other events. I highly doubt that Destra’s market value is $30,000. It’s more around $8,000. Moreover, Wyclef has not had a hit song in a few years. He has fallen off of the music scene. I would like the Commission to produce evidence of other venues where Wyclef - in recent time - earned $70,000. Frankly, $25,000 would have been a good pay day for him.

And then there are our Bahamian artists. Firstly, not nearly enough Bahamians are involved in the upcoming BJC. However, what hurt my heart was when I spoke to Stileet, who is performing in Grand Bahama and hasn’t yet been invited to perform here in Nassau. Stileet is one of the best Bahamian performers today. So, curious, I asked Stileet how much he was being paid. He told me that he was being paid $2,000 to perform. I became angry and overcome with how disrespectful the Commission and their puppeteers have been to Bahamian artists.

How could an established and authentic Bahamian rake-and-scrape artist and a great performer be paid $2,000 whilst Destra collects $30 grand? And yes, Stileet has made inroads on the international scene.

Why aren’t more Bahamians in the Nassau line-up? Where’s Geno D, Stileet, Ronnie Butler, Avvy, DMac, Visage, Julien Believe, etc?

I want to see these Bahamian artists on the stage. And they need to be paid competitive performance fees.

What is the $7m for when we have seen no international advertisement and only a few local advertisements downtown, with a few cheap flags flying in the wind? We continue to wait for the reconciliation of costs overruns from last year.

In ancient Rome, there were gladiator bouts in the colosseum to keep the people distracted and entertained. This same thing is being done to the Bahamian people. There is no solution to crime, but let’s keep the people entertained. Baha Mar is delayed, but let’s keep the people entertained.

There will be many who attend the carnival. I will too. They have spent my taxes and I want to be there, front and centre. I paid for and attended last year’s event as well. No doubt, the whip is also on for PLP ministers, senators and MPs who will be forced to parade on the street to elevate the numbers. Interestingly, we are perhaps the only country in the world where it was acceptable to have our leading female figures and holders of constitutional offices - our Attorney General Allyson Maynard-Gibson, President of the Senate Sharon Wilson - parading, scantily clad, throughout the streets of New Providence. That, in my opinion, was in poor taste.

The Junkanoo Carnival lacks authenticity and, frankly, amounts to a crude attempt to link something inauthentic for the purpose of meeting the market place to authentic aspects of our native culture. It is most significant when one notes that we have seemingly discarded the cultural contributions of Bahamians for nothing less than commercialised and imported pop culture.

How does this develop the entertainment component of the country’s tourism industry?

Since last May, the first time the BNFC - which has charge of the Carnival - met was in January. How could they possibly, so late in the game, devise any plan to uplift Bahamian culture? How could they possibly plan to create opportunities for entrepreneurship and cultural proliferation throughout the country when they meet at the eleventh hour?

The public was promised that this year’s festival would be more structured, better budgeted and constructed in such a way to guarantee a solid return on investment. However, on the face of it, we can yet again censure the lethargic organisers for poor and rushed planning, not enough international marketing and not announcing the artists for the festival’s concert sooner.

In terms of the planning for the headliner/s, the international promotions and marketing and putting actual heads in beds, we see a repeat of last year. I doubt it will spur major economic activity. How sad.

On the face of it, it seems clear that Paul Major - chairman of the BNFC - has seemingly taken us all for dodos.

Last year, although Mr Major revealed information that was uninspiring and worrisome as we got no return from the Carnival 2015, he stood by his projection that the inaugural festival increased Bahamian gross domestic product (GDP) by more than $50m, with - according to him - the event having a direct economic impact of $19m (including $5.5m in Grand Bahama).

$11m of taxpayers monies was spent and the government failed to secure a return!

According to Mr Major, for its over-budgeted $11.3m investment in last year’s festivities, the government reaped $8.3m in combined direct and tax revenues, with the latter providing $6.7m of that sum. The direct revenue, which totalled $1.6m, largely came from ticket sales and cash sponsorships.

Have the vendors who reportedly lost money during carnival 2015 been paid as pledged by Mr Major and the organisers?

Is Mr Major’s remuneration a major bill that is being paid from Carnival’s $7m budget? How much was Mr Major paid last year, if anything?

It would be wonderful to have a national cultural festival that puts on display every aspect of Bahamian culture, from our painting to food to music to dance to folklore and so on. Today, we see a copied foreign thing that is passed off as our own. I’m told that were it not for a last minute compromise - where the word “junkanoo” was thrown in the title of the event - there would be no reference to junkanoo or any of the firm pillars of Bahamian culture. It is a shame and a disgrace that junkanoo, the major cultural festival of the Bahamas, yearly struggles to find sponsorship and, rather than making this function more attractive and well run, the government has chosen to bring in foreign entities, financed by the public.

Such an approach is doing great damage to the concept of junkanoo which was rated by USA Today readers as the top Caribbean festival. Given that, why can’t we really have a Bahamas Junkanoo Festival?

The Commission and those with influence on the decision-making have lost their way. They do not appear to fully understand the significance and symbolism of what they are doing. They are seemingly minimising and downplaying the dilution of all that is real with our cultural expression. It’s very unfortunate.

Where are the junkanoo groups? The Commission ought to listen to junkanooers and local artists so that we can further develop our own musical brand. Joseph Spence kept it Bahamian. I was on a flight to Holland a few years ago and a gentleman from Kentucky, who played in a band there, was gung-ho for Joseph Spence and his authentic sounds.

We hate ourselves too much. Our leaders seem to hate being Bahamian. They pretend that it’s all about Bahamians during election cycles. Don’t be fooled. Let’s take into account their actions, not their words.

Comments and responses to ajbahama@hotmail.com