Dear Editor,
The revelations that Carifesta X (2008) was estimated to have cost $1 billion, as opposed to the $500 million claimed by former minister of culture Dr Frank Anthony come as no surprise to me considering the studied and perennial reluctance of Dr Anthony to provide answers not only on this issue but several others.
Most notably, he has yet to provide any significant accountability on the Caribbean Press and has left office promising to do so in the National Assembly without any effort made to fulfil that promise.
I repeat my calls, now under the new dispensation, for a thorough audit of the cultural activities and initiatives under the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport during the tenure of the previous minister. Special attention needs to be paid to the Sports and Arts Development Fund, the Caribbean Press, the Guyana Prize, spending on infrastructure, and the country’s participation in overseas-based festivals.
The estimated hundreds of millions wasted could have been spent on both policy formulation, including the national consultation that has long been needed on cultural policy, and on the very programmes that could have been put in place to create a better environment for cultural and creative arts development.
In my mind, these recent revelations represent the tip of the iceberg with regard to the gross mismanagement of culture over the previous nine years at the very least. However, it was not simply an indictment of the former minister’s incompetence, but of all the stakeholders who could have prevented it but chose the path of complicity either by their silence or direct collusion.
If the current government is indeed serious about building a better society, it has to begin with a baseline of holding the previous administration accountable in far more concrete terms than simple rhetoric.
At present, we are faced with the absurdity not only of the principal people involved in the Carifesta fiasco escaping accountability, but two of them, the former minister as well as Carifesta X CEO Nigel Dharamlall, comfortably occupying seats in the National Assembly as PPP members of Parliament. A motion needs to be moved when the assembly resumes seeking accountability on this issue with serious questions posed to both Mr Dharamlall and Dr Anthony.
As for the other stakeholders ‒ those involved in creative and cultural work ‒ the abdication of the responsibilities of citizenship that occurred under the previous administration cannot be corrected, but those responsibilities can and should be taken up under the new regime. I maintain that our problems are primarily cultural and it will take our best creative minds operating in the best possible environment to reverse the decline as we head into our second half-century of independence. That environment was deliberately sabotaged, exploited and suppressed under the PPP and unless decisive, clear-cut and concrete measures are put in place to fix it, we will get nowhere.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
