THE staging of this year's National Calypso Monarch and Extempo Monarch competitions remain in doubt even as executives from the National Carnival Commission (NCC) and the Trinbago Unified Calypsonians Organisation (TUCO) were said to be locked in a meeting on Monday evening to try and hammer out a deal.
This came after the calypso monarch preliminaries were postponed on Saturday while the extempo preliminaries were postponed on Monday.
At the crux of the matter is TUCO being given $1.5 million out of the NCC's $15 million Taste of Carnival budget, when TUCO originally asked for $2.5 million.
Its president Ainsley King said $1.5 million is not enough to stage all of TUCO's Taste of Carnival events including the calypso and extempo monarch competitions.
King also took NCC boss Winston "Gypsy" Peters to task for giving assurances, as reported in the media, that the calypso monarch competition will go ahead even as questions over its staging remained unanswered up to Monday evening.
King was asking on Monday who was really in charge of TUCO – its general council which he heads, or Gypsy?
Speaking with Newsday on Monday, King said the authority of the organisation seemed to somehow have been removed from TUCO and placed elsewhere.
“Because we hearing people say the (calypso monarch) competition is going to go on the stage (Dimanche Gras). I want to know who is really in charge of TUCO? If it is the general council or if it is, for example, the NCC chairman is now in charge of TUCO?
“You are sensing like there are mindsets (bent on) usurping authority and that is a very dangerous thing,” King said.
He added he was hearing it being said that a competition TUCO is supposed to be in charge of, is going to take place regardless of what happens.
A Sunday Newsday report quoted Gypsy saying, during an i95.5 FM radio interview, that there would be a calypso monarch prelims, semi-finals and the finals at Dimanche Gras.
“I can assure you right now that there will be calypso in A Taste of Carnival. I can give you that assurance that that will happen. It’s not that it may happen. It’s not that it may not happen...I am saying to you that it will happen.
“We will have calypso and we will have calypso in abundance the way it’s supposed to be had,” the Sunday Newsday quoted Gypsy as saying.
King said TUCO found itself in an even more difficult position where plans were made and now it was forced to halt these plans. Nevertheless, King said he remains optimistic about getting the funding needed to host the events.
“When you work out the maths, it is not like our ask is an unreasonable ask.”
[caption id="attachment_939728" align="alignnone" width="549"] TUCO president Ainsley King. -[/caption]
He said past budgets for TUCO alone were between $7-$10 million.
King said the organisation had scaled down its plans immensely in reaching a figure of $2.5 million, cognisant of the fact that the NCC was working with a drastically reduced allocation from Government.
“The way things are happening, I think the c
