Mark Lyndersay writes a weekly column for the Newsday.
IT MIGHT be more accurate to ask what Carnival’s stakeholders want, but the reality of 21st century mas is that it is driven by powerful interests, most of which are self-interests.
The NCC has abdicated its role as the guiding arm of the State in the festival to become an enabler of the duly elected representatives of masqueraders, calypsonians and steelbands.
That’s turned into an unmitigated disaster for Carnival, as tends to be the case with any business model that is driven by massive, poorly controlled subsidy.
The result is a hierarchy of control which creates unhealthy tenures in high office among stakeholder organisations, the entrenching of well-tended cabals and the institutional discouragement of difficult decisions which advance the art forms but are likely to prove unpopular.
Management of the event has now become politics.
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