Don’t blame us for our loud-mouth, blame the system!
For years, award shows in Ghana have been fingered for bias, bribery and favoritism by organizers. We have seen lots of award shows come to pass and currently there are over 5 award schemes in Ghana and yet very few are credible. More keeps coming everyday.
In the western world, prestigious awards like The Grammys, The Oscars, BET Awards, MTV Awards, Billboard Awards etc all end with little to no drama and the reason is, careful research is done to award deserving acts during the period in review and organization of these award shows are handled by a team of highly skilled experts. There are no flaws and are watched by many around the world. The case is totally different in our side of the world.
First, award shows in Ghana asks aspiring nominees to submit their work before nominated or usually create a blog for fans to nominate their favorite acts. That is the first wrong step almost every award show in Ghana makes. What is the whole point of rewarding if I have to submit my work? What was the committee and board of the award shows doing the whole year and what is their job.
Secondly award shows in Ghana do not use credible data, like number of sales, number of air play, traffic to judge it’s winners, they use voting systems where fans have to vote to choose their winners. By using this method, deserving acts do not win if their fans do not vote. This is silly because I know of a couple of artistes who will buy airtime and vote for themselves to win, where is the credibility in that? Also, organizers use this method to make money from the giant telcos who usually sponsor these events.
Lastly, favoritism. In Ghana, award shows favor organizers and their favorites, for instance most board members of various award shows are artiste managers, publicists, producers of at least a couple of nominees and they give the awards in favor of them.
Now all that being said, let’s take a look at credible award shows in Ghana and the bogus ones.
Ghana DJ Awards – Bogus
The maiden edition of an original and excellent idea to reward DJ’s for their input in the industry was a total failure. In the following edition, many DJs opted out because the awards show was a total disaster and was not very credible enough. Organization of the show itself was poor as it was made public by critics and fans. Now the DJs who are being rewarded could care less about the awards show.