Wake up, pan still in danger

April 24, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

Why do we keep talking and never implement anything? What is wrong with us? Where is our will to do whatever is essential and necessary?

We have been talking for decades about pan, our invention, being in danger. Calypsonians have warned us in song for years about our own creative manifestation being stolen from us. Everywhere one heard the talk that pan must or should be patented.

Regimes in the past have made much ado about legal guarantees for our creative and intellectual property, even the much touted "works of mas", and have even declared pan the national instrument, yet today not one damn thing has been done.

In T&T, one can hear and participate in intelligent conversation almost everywhere, talk, but nothing intelligent ever seems to happen. We suffer from "lack o' do".

It is amazing that in the year 2002, two Americans can have the audacity to attempt "to patent a manufacturing process for the Caribbean steel pan." And we still are not waking up to the realities.

In fact, the news broke last week and up to the time of writing of this column, there has been no response in terms of what is to be done from officialdom. Is it not important?

Lloyd Best has pontificated enough about "schools in pan", rather than "pan in schools" envisaging a fundamental revolution in terms of how we see education.

Drs Ralph Henry and Keith Nurse have long done the research showing very preliminary, but awesome, figures that value the returns to the society that comes from pan and its handmaidens, calypso and Carnival.

Even yours truly added two cents many moons ago. What I had to say was as follows:

"...Investments of $300 million in plant and equipment to create, say, 100 permanent jobs means simply that it takes an injection of $3 million to create one single job. Only we in T&T seem to be oblivious to what is clear to everyone else.

"It is essential to all countries, whether developed or developing, that, beside the capital intensive areas, there must be interlinking sectors, domestic-driven and generated, that are labour intensive, that can serve to absorb human resources and create a whole new and diverse range of products that can find niche markets around the world.

"The first task is to dispel the nonsensical notion cultural products are about pleasure and not big business. The $253 million the Henry and Nurse study attributes to Carnival and Carnival-related activity did not come about due to any astute planning or corporate policy formulation on anybody's behalf. It came through the whims and fancies of individuals who saw opportunities and seized them.

"The time has come for us to do away with the 'vyke-vyke' approach to our national concerns. We need to establish firmly and extend the entertainment sector to take up the slack and cushion the fallout that is upon us as a result of the uncertainties and vagaries of the energy and the energy-based industrial sector.

"And while calypso desperately needs direction and corporate experimentation as to how best it can be packaged and marketed as the major ingredient in all of what is now termed world beat fusion, the pan needs nothing but commonsense and national political will to be translated almost immediately into a potential billion dollar industry.

"The niche markets are there for pan from Japan to Los Angeles.

"Listen to this scenario: A decade ago, one pan pioneer came home and told officials in the Ministry of Culture he had before him a particular consideration that involved the establishing of a steelband unit in every chapter of the Boy Scout Movement in the USA. All he desired of the State were two guarantees:

"1. Pan-tuning schools be set up throughout T&T, so pan-tuners could be had in critical mass enough to take up residence abroad and be housed wherever in the world a pan unit is established to maintain the pans.

"2. Pan-tuning tools be specially designed, manufactured and packaged professionally, with the help of Ispat and MIC, to accompany the worldwide marketing of the instrument.

"That, mind you, from a supposedly uneducated pan pioneer, whom many in the ministry did not take seriously. In fact, some of our pan pioneers have insisted, symbolically, that one day the discarded oil drum will come to mean as much to the social well-being of this nation as oil itself.

"Who is to doubt the possibilities? All it requires is intelligent functioning. Maybe the time has come for us to stop listening to any politician who has no policy on pan and calypso and Carnival as industry"