Making Carnival work ethic develop Trinidad and Tobago

If Trinidad and Tobago could and would harness the work ethic and/or creativity represented annually in Carnival, Divali and Hosay then the country would be far stronger economically, industrially, agriculturally and socially than it is today.

In addition, the incredible designs of costumes, headpieces, tadjahs and floats, among others, could be translated into making a valid contribution to other yet allied around the year areas of design, for example, fashion and architecture, footwear and millinery.

The long hours of work put in by the several levels of responsibility, whether bandleaders, section heads, tadjah builders, seamstresses, wire benders, tacit milliners, shoemakers, costume designers, all bent on the maintaining of schedules, are nothing short of phenomenal.

In turn, pan musicians spend hours for way into the night and virtually all day on weekends for the several weeks leading up to Carnival, rehearsing the year’s calypso and soca favourites for Panorama and the street festival itself.

Tabla and tassa drummers also forgo sleep, practising and practising, so that with the coming around of Divali and/or Hosay they can achieve the desired effect of musical colour and sound.

Productivity is at its highest, particularly at Carnival time. Meanwhile, an astonishing feature which always will be worthy of comment and salute is that many of the skilled and semi-skilled workers and musicians do it for less than they would normally earn per hour in their regular jobs. Specifically, if we factor into the equation the crucial point that many, if not all of them, work overtime, and weekends too at that, on Carnival costumes, inter alia, and toil in the Carnival vineyard for what would amount to less than negotiated factory wages and/or office salaries.

Transfer this work ethic to the normal work place then manufacturers and producers, offices and plants would note a surge in productivity which would, substantially, lower the cost of production and make their goods and services that much more competitive in the domestic, regional and international market place.

Productivity wise, Trinidad and Tobago, ironically, would be a second Singapore and be able to cock a snook at former Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Yuan Kew’s sneering comment about "Trinidad’s Carnival mentality." If only because the "Carnival mentality" by the skilled and semi-skilled workers during the pre-Carnival season equates to productivity at its highest.

And this is what the nation needs, and not merely in the work place, but in the classroom, as well as in after classroom — at home — studies.

In turn, it is not enough for there to be a work place productivity surge in plants and offices alone, but in agriculture as well.

We need to revisit the December, 1978 White Paper on Agriculture; the October, 1980 Report "Investigation into the Agricultural Labour Supply Situation in Trinidad and Tobago and the argument put forward by late Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Dr Eric Williams, in his 1980 Budget Speech to attract more citizens to agriculture.

Dr Williams had called for the distribution of land, by way of 30-year leases on three to five-acre allotments to bona fide farmers.

This would have included the provision of housing to those without homes.

The School Nutrition Programme would have had "first call on all farm produce." Agricultural loan facilities, by way of the Agricultural Development Bank were to be made available to all of the selected farmers to enable them to acquire equipment.

We have to understand as a people that despite the surge in oil and natural gas prices on the international market, and the steady increase in the production of natural gas and the establishment of trains by Atlantic LNG for the production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from this, the country needs, and desperately, an increase in productivity in the non-energy (and non-energy based) sector, including agriculture, and a maintaining of this productivity.

If we can do it for the annual two-day Festival of Carnival, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Hosay and Divali, we can at least seek to achieve it in the work place and in the classroom.

Globalisation demands nothing less of us.