Min­is­ter of Cul­ture and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Michelle Ben­jamin has ac­knowl­edged the con­cerns raised by the Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee of Trinidad and To­ba­go (ES­CTT) over gov­ern­ment fund­ing but says re­form of the fes­ti­val is ur­gent­ly need­ed.

Re­spond­ing to re­marks by ES­CTT ex­ec­u­tive chair Za­kiya Uzoma-Wada­da, who de­scribed Eman­ci­pa­tion as “a win for all hu­man­i­ty” and “an on­go­ing jour­ney to­ward [black] iden­ti­ty, jus­tice and trans­for­ma­tion,” Ben­jamin said while the min­istry ac­cepts the con­cerns “with cer­tain reser­va­tions,” the com­mit­tee must recog­nise it is “on­ly one strand in the larg­er fab­ric of the Eman­ci­pa­tion jour­ney.”

In a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day, Ben­jamin re­mind­ed the ES­CTT that the cur­rent gov­ern­ment in­her­it­ed a $9 bil­lion deficit, which con­tin­ues to af­fect al­lo­ca­tions. She said while the ES­CTT has made de­mands, the com­mit­tee al­so ben­e­fit­ed from sub­stan­tial sup­port un­der the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion.