Of Pageants, Football and Other Things

07, Jun 1999
We revel in spectacle. But spectacle is supposed to be the end result of process. First there has to be vision and an understanding of the mission, then the painstaking, slow grind of pulling together the right blend and mix of skills, expertise and talent around a programme of activity wherein theoretical and policy formulation is tested in practice.

Moreover, it is the practice, that slow, painstaking process, that fleshes out the vision and the mission, the idea, the ideal, the ideology, the philosophy, the objective, whatever you may wish to call it. And at a said point the painstaking work begins to yield fruit, the infrastructure and organisation that had been firmly planted on the ground is nurtured by, and in turn nurtures, the expertise with which it mingles and intertwines.

The result is the spectacle of flowering. But you can never have the flowering before the hard work and the grind and the application of intelligent functioning. Any attempt to put the cart before the horse, to have the spectacle before the hard work of ploughing results in a force-ripe fruit or a wilted flower. In T&T, in almost every endeavour, we keep making this cardinal mistake.

The pageant was no different. That is why today there are so many disappointed and aggrieved people who are out of pocket having been fooled by all the hype about swarms of tourists and investors generated by grinning, idiotic politicians and senseless bureaucrats. "But the world saw us", they babble, "we are now on the map." Again that constant need for validation and measurement from outside.

So 2.5 billion people saw T&T as a result of the pageant. So what! We got nothing from the TV rights. We merely rented out the islands for nothing and paid probably up to a $100 million to host a show. Most of that supposed 2.5 billion viewers probably do not have an extra cent after paying their rents and food bills, most of them probably live and work and will die without ever leaving a radius of ten blocks in various cities around the world and may only dream of travel and overseas investments if they were to ever win the Lotto.

On the other hand, T&T within the last decade have had foreign investments in the energy and petrochemical sector to the tune of over $4 billion. Outside of Canada we are reputed to be the area that received the biggest chunk of American overseas investments. We are well known by those who wield power and capital from Tokyo to Seattle.

Why? Because we possess one of the oldest oil industries in the entire world and are known to have a highly developed skilled strata of oil and energy-based workers who require little or no training to man modern technologies. Interestingly, we helped pioneer the government-to-government investment arrangements typical of the '70s and the corporate consortium investment strategies that became the preferred choice later. In addition, we produce here a "sweet" crude oil that requires no desulpherisation. The desulpherisation plant established here was mainly used to "sweeten" crude oil brought in from the Middle East and other parts of the world.

We have been central to the plans of giant corporations like Texaco and Amoco for years, and now similarly for others like British Gas. Tesoro was a Texas gas distributing company virtually unknown outside of Texas until T&T provided it with the wherewithal to get a foothold in Latin America and Indonesia. Who putting who on the map?

Could a one-night pageant do for us what in fact the sum total of our history and infrastructural development has done for us for so many years?

And if it is that we may wish to develop our tourism sector, then it stands to reason that we must decide what the modern tourist product requires and approach it as we have approached the development of our other sectors, but to feel that the spectacle of a pageant will suffice in bringing "hundreds and hundreds of tourists as we look around" is really to be forming the ass as the old folks used to say.

The logic is the same in many other areas. "Pan", as we said before in this space, is a "billion dollar industry", but we keep looking for the spectacle of a "World's Panorama", or a "World's Music Festival Pan Competition", to be the mother of all pan shows so that foreigners can come here and pat us on the back for putting on a good show rather than looking at the infrastructural demands required to make "pan" a lucrative international industry.

In regard to "football" it is even worse. We are always looking to stage some world tournament even if it involves seven-a-side ancient and obese "stars" contesting for $100,000 prizes, while our game needs technical improvement and our players are still in want of basic needs and facilities.

We are now building five stadia around the country to stage the Under 17 World's Tournament at tremendous cost but our national players do not have the money to train properly, to be encamped permanently nor to go on tours to develop their skills by engaging top class teams as Jamaica does. Staging a tournament here is not necessarily building our football game.
Pageant, football or pan, the logic is the same.