After taking part in 21 consecutive Grand Kadooment events, one of the island’s largest and most popular Kadooment bands, Baje International will not be hitting the road this year.
The band made the surprise announcement to its followers in a social media post on Thursday, in which it blamed logistical issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic as one of the main reasons.
Speaking to Barbados TODAY, founder of Baje International, Richard Haynes explained that the band simply was not in a position to provide revellers with the usual high-quality costumes because of issues with suppliers. The possibility exists, that costumes would not have been on the island in time for Kadooment Day.
Haynes gave the assurance that every option had been explored before making what he described as a “heartbreaking” decision.
The band leader said while Baje usually catered to around 1200 revellers, this year they had had been hoping to bring a scaled down band of between 700 to 800 persons.
“We’ve done 21 bands before COVID hit us, 21 consecutive bands. All 21 bands had challenges as all bands do but we managed to deliver to our revellers each and every year on time and as promised. This year we had every intention of doing the exact same. As a matter of fact we have our band designs, we have our prototypes produced, we have our marketing campaign ready, we’ve done all of that over the last few months, as it was it was late notice but we were certainly excited to get back to the road for 2022,” he said via telephone.
“However, obviously core to our process was negotiations with our suppliers. There is no secret that there are major global challenges right now, especially as it relates to supply chains due to COVID-19. We do get most of our materials externally. We purchase as much as we can locally and regionally, but we have to go outside to our suppliers for a lot of our materials and our discussions became more and more intense and we started to realize that these problems can even present an issue where we may not be able to get our materials and our costumes here on time for our revelers.
“We explored several different options and up until literally 72 hours ago we were exhausting and having conversations with our suppliers and every network we have and when the feedback came back that, ‘look we can produce this band for Baje but we cannot guarantee 100 per cent that it will be in Barbados in time for your revellers Kadooment Day, then at that stage we had to make the extremely difficult and emotional decision to pull the plug.
“We know that we made the right decision because we cannot subject our revellers to that risk. They have been loyal to us for 21 bands and we certainly cannot subject them to that risk, so what we have done is we have pulled the band for this year,” Haynes added.
The veteran band leader however, promised that Baje would be back on the road for 2023, giving the assurance that they had already started preparations for next year’s Crop Over Festival.
“We are on the road for next year, we’ve started our production process already and thankfully our sponsors have been very supportive, our revellers have been very supportive although they are very disappointed as are we. It literally feels surreal to not be part of the festival this year…but we are head down and focused on 2023 to bring back a band to the road that people can expect of Baje – of the highest quality,” Haynes said.
He revealed that Baje would be hosting an event in July for “its revellers and for Bim”. randybennett@barbadostoday.bb
