When a family is planning a wedding, it is usually not the flowers that break the budget. It is the little things that no one priced properly at the start. Transport runs over. Extra chairs are needed. Somebody forgot the generator. These changes become the real bill. Governments do this too, except that when they get it wrong, remember that they are spending from the public’s pocket.
That is why the row over Barbados’ 2025 CARIFESTA celebrations matters. Not because culture is unimportant. Far less the economy at that. Quite the opposite. It matters because the reported cost of the event ballooned to BDS$35.7 million from an original approved estimate of BDS$4 million. Once numbers move that far apart, the issue is no longer simply whether the event was enjoyable or whether some people benefited. The issue becomes whether the state knew, in any serious way, what it was doing before it started spending.
I find that this is where we in Barbados often get a little sentimental and, frankly, a little sloppy. The moment public expenditure touches culture, sport, or heritage, a strange immunity kicks in. You just to follow parliament over the past week or so. Questions about value for money are treated almost as insults. Yet the opposite should be true. If government is serious about building the creative sector, then it must be even more careful with how it budgets for it. Nothing damages confidence in public support for culture more quickly than the feeling that government is making it up as it goes along.
That would be bad enough on its own. It is worse because government has been signalling that it wants to provide real support to the creative sector as part of economic development strategy. That is a good instinct. Barbados cannot continue speaking endlessly about diversification while pretending that only tourism, construction, and traditional business services count as productive sectors. Creative industries matter. They create jobs, shape national identity, drive visitor interest, and can export Barbadian talent far beyond our shores. But if fiscal support is to be sustained, it must rest on credible budgeting and clear monitoring. Otherwise the public will eventually conclude that support for the arts is merely another avenue for weak financial discipline.
Monitoring and evaluation sound like the sort of dull phrases that civil servants bury in presentations. They are not dull at all. They are the difference between policy and improvisation. Proper monitoring would mean deciding from the beginning what an event is meant to achieve, what it is allowed to cost, where the main financial risks are, and what warning signs should trigger adjustment before matters get out of hand. Proper evaluation would mean asking afterwards what the country actually got for its money. How many visitors came because of the event? How much did local vendors earn? How many local artists secured future business? What foreign exchange was generated? What lasting infrastructure or industry relationships were created? Those are ordinary questions. The scandal is that we so often ask them only after the money has gone.
A country does not need to be hostile to ambition to insist on realistic budgets. In fact, prudence is what makes ambition sustainable. Anyone who has run even a modest event knows this. The quickest way to kill future support is to come back long after the fact, hat in hand, explaining that the original budget was never realistic anyway. If that is true, then the failure happened at the start. A budget should be a plan, not a hopeful opening bid.
This matters even more now because the world around us has become dangerously unstable. Reporting this week showed Brent crude settling at about US$112.57 per barrel, up sharply since the war involving Iran intensified a month ago. Analysts cited heavy supply disruption and the continuing threat around the Strait of Hormuz. For a country like Barbados, that is not distant drama for television screens. It is fuel, freight, electricity, insurance, imported food, and inflation. Every external shock eventually arrives here in the price of something ordinary. It may be bread. It may be bus fare. It may be the cost of keeping a small business open for one more month.
Then, just over the past day, the Houthis formally entered the conflict with an attack on Israel. That matters because whenever that theatre becomes more volatile, global shipping nerves worsen. Routes connected to the Red Sea and nearby choke points become more exposed to disruption, delay, and higher insurance costs. Small open economies like ours feel that very quickly. We do not produce enough of what we consume. We import vulnerability by the container load. So when government runs overruns at home as though the global environment were calm and forgiving, it is really gambling with space that may be badly needed later.
The Venezuela question adds another layer of uncertainty. Recent reporting indicates that the United States has taken control of Venezuela’s oil sale proceeds through a fund while broadening authorisations over who is supplied.. That may prove strategically effective for Washington. It may even be presented as orderly. But for the Caribbean it means that the future of any Venezuelan oil-based support arrangement is now even more politically contingent than before. PetroCaribe was never just about oil. It was about breathing room. It allowed several OECS countries, among others, to ease the upfront cash burden of energy imports and preserve some fiscal space. If that arrangement becomes less predictable, or more subject to geopolitical bargaining, those islands could face greater financing pressure, tougher subsidy choices, and higher exposure to sudden energy price spikes.
Barbados is not insulated from that simply because it is not similarly positioned within PetroCaribe. In the near term, pressure on our neighbours can spill into the wider regional economy through weaker demand, softer tourism flows, more fragile public finances, and general investor unease about the Caribbean’s energy exposure. In the longer term, it reinforces something we should already know: small states that do not budget carefully in good or moderate times end up making uglier decisions in bad times. If concessional energy arrangements weaken, then every wasted dollar at home becomes more costly. Every overrun becomes less innocent.
That is the broader lesson from CARIFESTA. This is not a quarrel between culture and economics. It is an argument for respecting both. If government truly wants to support the creative sector, then it must do so with budgets that are realistic, transparent, and monitored in real time. Otherwise support for the arts will end up carrying the stigma of fiscal indiscipline, which would be unfair to artists and dangerous for public policy.
Wars are lifting energy risks. Shipping nerves are deepening. Regional oil arrangements may become more uncertain. In that kind of world, a government cannot afford to budget by romance and explain by surprise. Public expenditure must be guided by discipline, especially when the spending is being sold as investment. That is the only way to protect the taxpayer, the credibility of the state, and yes, the future of the very creative sector government says it wants to help.