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BRING BACK A MINISTRY OF CULTURE AND SPORT

May 30, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The arrests this week of top officials of footballing association attached to the world governing body for football, FIFA was long in the making. Even before the last World Cup in Brazil, allegations of corruption had been swirling over FIFA.
The gravity of the corruption will shock many. But it should not; football is big business. Football is no longer a game. It is a commercial enterprise. Some of the major clubs in Europe have budgets far higher than the entire national Budgets of countries in the Caribbean.
The first thing to understand, therefore, is that football is big business. Sport is big business. There are big bucks to be earned in sports by athletes, sporting organizations and countries, yes countries.
Culture is also big business. Just take a look at the music industry and the fashion industry. Both of these industries make more money than some commodities that are globally traded. When you add movies and other cultural products, the magnitude of the cultural industry is awesome.
Sports and culture can become major money earners for economies. If they are properly organized they can displace many of the traditional sectors of the economy. They are major economic earners and are important to other sectors such as tourism.
Governments all over the world are beginning to appreciate the economic potential of culture and sports. Some of these countries are willing to simply regulate these sectors and allow the private sector to make the money that is to be made. But many developing countries, short on cultural facilities and resources, are attempting to grow these sectors through direct investment by Governments.
These governments are willing to build up their cultural industries to the point where they can manage themselves. This is why it is all the more baffling why the present APNU+AFC government has decided to absorb culture and sports into the Education ministry.  This is a most unwise decision and one which the government is likely to regret.
Sport and Culture need their own ministry. If the government develops the right products in sports and culture, the Ministry will more than pay for itself many times over. But if sports and culture are absorbed into the Ministry of Education it is more likely that these industries are going to be accorded less than the priority they deserve.
This move disassembles the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport may have been considered rationalization in the seventies, eighties and even nineties. But not today when both sports and culture are multibillion dollar industries. Guyana needs a separate ministry to regulate these industries and to boost them until such time that they can be handed over exclusively to the private sector.
In the next month, the Caribbean Premier League is going to be launched. This tournament will boost the economy. It may not at this stage bring a return to the sponsors but eventually this tournament is going to be one of the biggest in the world, attracting billions of dollars in advertising revenues.
The same thing can happen in other sports. The PPP may have been slow in coming around to the economic potential of sports and culture. But it seems as if this APNU+AFC do not have a clue about this potential.
Somebody needs to sit down with the government and advise it that instead of creating all manner of ministries which the public knows little about, they should resuscitate a separate Ministry of Sports and Culture.
APNU+AFC are going backwards instead of forwards. They should reverse their present course and recognize the huge commercial interests involved in culture and sports and the huge economic benefits they can generate.

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