For most of December, Calabar is a carnival town. The bands rehearse from September, the costumes take months, and the parade fills the roads for weeks. It is genuinely the largest street festival on the continent and the city is entitled to say so.
The economic case has always been made in terms of visitor numbers, and visitor numbers are the easiest figure to inflate and the least useful to have. The more interesting number is how many people are paid, for how long, and whether the work is annual or seasonal.
“A city cannot run for eleven months on the strength of the twelfth. Calabar has been trying to for twenty years.”
None of this is an argument against the carnival, which is a real cultural achievement built largely by people from the city. It is an argument about what a state expects a festival to do, and whether a festival can carry it.
