‘I have to ask Hon Walwyn about Festival payments’ – Premier Smith
Premier Smith commented briefly on the matter during an event last Tuesday December 15, 2015 on the rooftop of the Cutlass Towers in Road Town, the Virgin Islands' capital city.
“I don’t know,” said Premier Smith when asked whether those outstanding payments were settled. “I’ll have to ask the Minister for Education and Culture. But I haven’t had any reports on that,” he told Virgin Islands News Online.
Many local artistes who performed at the 2015 Emancipation Festival, as well as persons who won prizes and those who performed other services, have long been complaining of not being paid for their work or given their prizes. Local artistes have noted that it is unfair that entertainers that came from abroad don’t have those issues.
An embarrassing situation
Speaking on his Speak Your Mind show on JTV Live some weeks ago, talk show host Richard Courtney de Castro commented on the issue after a viewer sent in a text message. De Castro called the situation embarrassing.
He suggested that the Virgin Islands Festival Committee gets its act together and ensure that the persons owed could get paid before Christmas. However, with one week to go and issues of payments for other contractors coming up over the past weeks, it is not clear whether this will happen.
“Ladies and gentlemen we have to be more accountable in the territory. We can’t take people for granted. You can’t just use people because they are local and pay other persons because of where they are [from],” de Castro had said on his show.
Mr de Castro then encouraged persons to have contracts drafted and signed before they entertain in future festivals. “Operate like a professional, treat them like another professional, and I guess we will get different results because we keep doing the same thing, going up there on the stage and performing every year and every year they holding the money until they feel like paying it. Jump up to the plate and make the change. Get a contract.”
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16 Responses to “‘I have to ask Hon Walwyn about Festival payments’ – Premier Smith”
OK. Now onto to paying local service providers for services rendered to the Emancipation celebrations. The celebration ended in early August and it is now December. It is time to pay up. How is it that international artists have been paid and local service providers are still sucking wind. Do not locals have obligations to meet? Treat local service providers with the same respect as international service providers. Xmas is next week so just pay the people. Enough already. Do not force local service providers to demand payment up front or even refrain from providing service. Does the Festival Committee lack the cash flow to pay up? Do we need an independent auditor to look at the operations?
M** GOT PAID FOR ALL THE PEOPLE WHO STAYED AT THE M***INGS AND EAT THERE THOUGH CONFLICT