Destination Cross River’s festival month is in full swing. As a build-up to the state’s annual flagship tourism event, Carnival Calabar, the second carnival dry run will take place in Calabar tomorrow. The Carnival Commission said the dry runs are aimed to finetune the preparation towards having a world-class carnival showpiece in the state capital later this month on Monday, December 28. The theme for this year’s edition of the carnival is Africanism.
Speaking on the theme for the year, the Special Adviser of the Cross River Sate Governor of Event Management, Mr. Ken Aklah, said the government wants to use the festival this year to unite Africa and that was the thinking behind the theme of Africanism.
He spoke further: “The government, as it is today, our major interest is truly how we could grow Carnival Calabar further. We believe strongly that to be able to have a world brand like we already have, which is engaging people to come to Calabar, we continually thrive to be able to grow in terms of value, trying to do value addition to the properties of Carnival Calabar. That is why year in year out, we introduce new thinking to see that we don’t create monotony. For everything, once it becomes monotonous, people get fed up with it. Everybody would run away. That is why we created the international carnival; the bikers’ parade; the Miss Africa pageant, all that came within these four years that we came on board.
“We decided that this year, instead of growing new event, because this is an election year for us, we should be able to sustain and make the products that we have created, better than how we started. So, we are going to sustain what we have created this year and make it better.
“But above all, more challenging theme for us this year is the theme of Africanism. The drive here is to see how we can use the festival and the carnival as a uniting force for the African continent. The governor thinks strongly it is doable, he thinks that for everything, it begins with a drop.”
In the same vein, Mr. Agwei Emmanuel, Principal Partner, Promotional innovation Synergy Limited, consultants to the carnival said part of the innovation was to see how to add value to the festival and make it attractive to top corporate organizations. He also said his organization aims to generate more revenue for the carnival by looking at different aspects of the carnival and make it attractive.
He said: “We feel that we should look at other components that can be revenue generators. One of such is the Festival Village. The festival village is such that we have been able to recreate the wooden stall into the 21st century prefabs. These are stalls that would be able to attract bigger brands into Calabar to deal with the socio-economic fibre of the state by making sure that the common man on the street benefits from the Carnival Calabar. That will equally increase the reach in terms of making sure that various brands that would have been aggressively spoken to, or will meet some level of aggression from us, would definitely come to us without us going to them.”
Agwei said the strategy they were putting in place was in line with Governor Ayade’s vision to make sure that the state is industrialized. He said his organization rode on that to attract one of the energy companies in Africa to provide two megawatts for the Festival Village for this year.
He spoke further: “We are making sure that Carnival Calabar for this year is clean, green and safe, running on solar panel renewable energy. We are looking at a wholistic approach that will change the socio-economic fibre of Cross River States. In doing this, we can’t but do it in partnership with the Cross River State government. This is an opportunity for us to make sure that we deliver on the idea behind this project in other perspective, beyond this, and outside the scope of what the tourism industry stands to benefit