Tag Archives: NCC

The National Carnival Commission (NCC) may have done more harm than good to the soca music industry by putting money into Soca Monarch. Soca Monarch organisers decided to give the so-called Power Soca more relevance and importance than the so-called Groovy. They decided to pay the Power Soca winner twice …

I raised one brow when Colin Lucas moved from being Chairman of the National Carnival Commission to becoming the Acting Chief Executive Officer. But my both eyebrows raised when he was succeeded by former UNC Minister of Culture Winston “Gypsy” Peters. Seamlessly moving from director to executive is not a …

Five months, four weeks, three days, two hours, one minute, one second, two ticks and one tock. As I begin to write, that’s how long it has been since the last note sounded on Carnival 2017. And at the NCC, Kenny De Silva is still chairmanning. Now let me say …

Forty days and 40 nights. And counting… NCC has had its say. Communications is largely silent. Tourism has been silenced. Community Development, Culture and the Arts has had nothing to say. But the volume of kangkatang in this year’s Carnival, it seems to me, makes a proper post-mortem imperative. And …

Not to take anything away from the 2017 winner, Dr Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool, the now record nine-time champion, the results of last night’s Calypso Monarch competition simply do not add up. And as the dissatisfaction with the organisers and complaints about the quality of the show multiply—as they are almost …

Currently, as has happened in the past, race talk has surfaced in the aftermath of a change of Government. Part of the problem is the widespread use and abuse of statutory corporations and so-called state enterprises as the vessels through which illegitimate or corrupt activity flows. When an election is …

The recent controversy over the dismissal of Dennise Demming as Chair of the Tourism Development Company (TDC) has sparked yet another round of debate on the role and operation of State-owned Enterprises (SoEs). Some of the issues which have arisen are: •What is the purpose of these SoEs? •How do …

Two of my previous reviews of Carnival unequivocally set out issues within the festival that are troubling, particularly if Government is to continue funding the festival at the significant levels that it does. Last year’s review The minority sport of Carnival, referred to “the obvious acceleration of Carnival’s decline into …

It shouldn’t be surprising, given the NCC’s failure to hold a public consultation on the copyright issues that arose in 2013, to find the whole ugly mess bubbling up again.  Photographers who went to the NCC to seek accreditation for the 2014 edition of the event found no reductions in …