Camp Mulla Members Now Going Solo

Camp Mulla may have come out a while back but this was their year. They got countless nominations in almost all the major international awards and almost every track they released topped the charts.

This is also the year that they released their debut album, FuNKYToWN, a 15-track ode to Nairobi, the hustle and ambition.
Now the members of the East Africa's hottest group will do solo projects.  hope they don't go blank like BLU3 did after the solo gigs

Marriage on TV: What a joke?

Some people lack the ability to laugh at them selves, so I guess thats where I come in.

I have to admit that I really love laughing at those continuous mistakes people make especially the stupid ones. Does anyone remember when one of our ministers said mbu “disaster didn't give us enough time to prepare”? I laughed at that one for a month but that aside, I also rant a lot, either loudly or with pen but either way, a rant served cold is my thing.

So, I don't want you to look at this page with surprise, am simply laying out what my mind tells me.

I understand many of you have seen or heard of those weird TV shows with people's weddings, I was told they are so famous but, with all due respect Ugandans, which kind of entertainment do you derive from watching other people exchange vows and say a lot of sweet bu nothings about each other?

Why are these shows even famous? People, what happened to staff like marriage is a sacred institution between two people and their family or friends?

Marriage is a family institute when its between your well wishers and family, marriage on a TV show becomes Mubanda Wa Kabaka, Zari: The Boss Lady and for the uptown girls it becomes Kardashians with a very broke production.

What hurts is that all the weddings showed on TV are the copycat American wannabe types of weddings. In many foreigners' minds, those go down as a typical ugandan wedding. I guess if my grandfather left his grave for my sister's kwanjula and saw what the ceremony is, he will be more than willing to die for good.

Deluded is the best word to explain today's ceremonies and the TV shows in the name of  entertainment have exposed this, for God's sake why on earth do you have to dress some girls up like doctors and nurses I hear to check whether the Bakos are healthy and instead of doing ethat, they are busy dancing to whoever minds only to put flowers on the groom and friends.

Then the man dressed as woman comes to greet as senga, am sorry but which part of culture is this, ok may be dressing him in women attires may not be that insulting but he even dances on Beyonce's song, really. He even dares to shake his bosom like he was a video vixen of sorts.

What of the local artists that come to mime their songs on weddings? Seriously why not use a CD then? If the karaoke performance wasn't enough, they will go a head to do songs that totally have nothing to do with marriage, I mean the time I saw Bobi Wine do his Jennifer song on a kwanjula, I fainted.

Its all in the name of a wedding ceremony for TV, then the alien dressing, for God's sake we know you love the local artistes and Ekigunda but don't dress like them, a blue, purple, red and yellow Gomesi?? then the girls with hair styles that suggest they've been taking Straka serious.........

Has anyone ever heard their love story? “we met at campus, I was sleeping in Akamwesi but then relocated to his room so he could have an easy access to my heart......”, ehhhh.

I can't forget the totally fake families on such shows, the daughter has a borrowed American accent, the father sounds Nigerian but is Mukasa and the mum sounds Spanish yet she's from Ankole. They then claim to have stayed in the US for so long thus fake accents. The problem is, as the TV guy is shooting, he pans and intentionally or not captures the father speaking clear cut Luganda and later they will tell us that they forgot the language thus the reason to conduct the entire ceremony in broken English.

Seriously, all for TV, if it had been a family thing no one would even be bothered but now we are bothered because, its our TV and someone is making us watch a speech that goes like; Dad, am so proud of you, you've been like a father to me.................... if this babe didn't laugh at herself,

Then I give up.

Komutale's wedding: Are we that bored?

some people didn't understand what the romp and publicity of this wedding was about

A wise man once said, “Its better to say too much than never to say what you need to say”, I must admit I learnt a lot from the statement even when I got issues with his general English.

I love getting my voice heard, I guess it’s the reason I joined a journalism school in the first place.

Last weekend our TV screens, courtesy of the national broadcaster condemned us to a wedding by one gorgeous (obviously that’s an understatement) Ruth Komutale.

I personally couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about, a national broadcaster scrapping the entire day schedule for a wedding?

Are we really this depressed?

If this had been a private TV, nobody would be complaining, in fact we could have treated this as a fully paid for advert for Toro.

A national broadcaster is usually a government owned TV and radio stations, with the main aim of informing the masses. Well on November 17^th, our national broadcaster probably forgot all about this.

For crying out loud, it was so unprofessional for a national TV to broadcast a person’s wedding for over 8 hours. True the wedding was a big thing and could have made headlines in any paper, radio and TV bulletins but in my personal opinion (which is so right) a live broadcast on two national TVs was simply overboard.

What national interest does Princess Komutale generate? She may be a princess but she is of Toro not Uganda. This is what makes the Kate Middleton case different, she and Prince William are royals of the Great Britain and in anyway you clearly understood BBC broadcasting that wedding live.

This could not come to act in the case of the gorgeous Komutale or the Kabaka’s wedding thirteen years ago.

The Kabaka may be a central figure among the Baganda just like Princess Komutale meant a lot to the people of Toro, but majority of the Ugandan citizens harbour no interest in these two’s marriage, they care less if Komutale is single or not.

I don’t want anyone to get me wrong, am happy for the princess and even at a tender age I was indeed happy for the kabaka in 1999 but, the broadcast of these two weddings is still questionable.

They are royals and thus very much respected in their respective kingdoms but to a larger Uganda, they are human beings like me and you. To a Muganda, the Kabaka deserves devine respect yet to a non Ganda, he’s just some man. The same goes to the princess.

Thus considering the fact that Uganda is not a monarch, scrapping an all day programme to screen a wedding that meant nothing to over 75% of the country citizens was an abuse.

I understand someone may reason that its part of their objective to promote culture, if that’s true did they broadcast different coronation ceremonies of different kingdoms be them big or small? Can we assume that only two royals got married or introduced in the past thirteen years?

Whatever happened to inspiring Uganda with constructive information?

Well as your cameras were rolling to some semi American-Toro wedding, for the first time in Uganda’s history of football, fans met and had sometime with the Cranes players. Just to refresh your minds on who the Cranes are, these are the boys who represent this country in multiple nations qualifiers and that other tournament we’ve won 12 times. I doubt if you have ever covered their training in real time, and next week they will have their backs against the ropes for the Ugandan pride, now that’s something of national interest.

And, oh yes, I would rather watch the Miss Uganda beauty pageant because at the end, she’s Miss Uganda not Buganda, Busoga, Toro or anything. If she’s to win at Miss World, few will even remember her name but her country of origin. As trivial as it sounds, it’s of national interest thus worth broadcasting on a national TV but a kingdom wedding! Do we lack a life or we are simply too bored?

Whatever happened to news…

one of the few good anchors of our time

When I was a student of journalism, my late teacher helped me define news in a couple of sentences, he said, News is a report of a recent event; intelligence; information or the presentation of a report on recent and new events in a newspaper, radio or television.

Just going by my teacher’s definitions, I realized news is meant to cover the total unusual or something new and important.

I grew up watching people like Bbale Francis take news anchoring to a whole new level in Uganda, he inspired me to want to become a celebrity, (In fact I even practiced signing autographs) he personally made news interesting not mentioning the way he almost made his name sound like chocolate.

Today, I admit we have a massive hyped production with bits of news and well, a lot of pretty faces….yes I just said it. I usually watch news in awe these days; I can’t help but wonder what happened to it.

As we used to assume, news is meant to be new but apparently, that’s what you think, not Ugandan TVs, for our stations news is something uniform. Their definition is simple, when you watch news on one station; you shall have watched news on all stations, yes, same organization and for international stories, the same word arrangement.

Sometimes I think, its like creativity has died on a large scale and no one cares anymore. I know many of you may reason that even CNN, BBC or Aljazeera share many stories but hey, each of them have those different feature stories that actually keep us glued, our TVs have some but truth is they drag to the bone.

News these days is so bad that, very many of us these days subscribe to the news on the other channel; I hear topical news became too predictable that before it’s aired you actually know about 80% of it, mbu the other 20% being the anchor’s dress code. 
Imagine the sort of arrangement; First story is from Parliament, second story is a continuation of the first, and third story is about a political analyst commenting about the story from parliament...like really??? 

As I was writing this article, primary seven candidates were writing their first paper and I predicted that the news that night would be about that, in fact I watched to see my prediction come to pass and trust me; with Ugandan TV you rarely go wrong. The entire TV headlines were “PLE starts” (which i think we all knew) and then, faces of happy candidates reminding us they were ready because they’ve been reading simanyi some Newspaper pullout. Now isn’t that sheer PR in news?

Now if that isn’t enough there are these year to year stories of babies born on, say Christmas day, people that work on christmas, company end of year parties!!! Then this thing of holding your TV awards, which are obviously won by your own staff and publicizing it in news like it was a Grammy or an Oscar won, that’s very draining, and oh, for crying out loud, using some phrase like “Movers and Shakers” in news stopped being cool (am reaching out to the print media too).

If producers actually cared, in the name of Jesus (yes am calling out for him) they would know that watching a non subtitled Luganda story when you can’t get the language is painful.

And, when did journalists start being the news? I mean you seriously tune in to watch current affairs, and guess what makes the headlines; our very good reporter gives birth to a baby boy, our presenter loses car, your famous presenter is married…….really? how is that news, I mean people get married everyday!!

This syndrome has however been existing in print longer than it has on TV; I remember ranting about reporters who took pictures of them selves instead of the event. I know many of you have seen articles where there captions like; the writer standing next to David Obua’s shirt, the writer drinking Obua’s coffee, the writer in Obua’s corridor…what the hell is wrong with the world? The story is enough to prove you were actually with him.

Away from the TV news, what’s with the misleading adverts by their sponsors? There’s this one that baffles me a lot. Your phone gets stolen and guess what they say “don’t worry be happy” mbu you can regain your contacts…..screw the contacts, that’s an Iphone5 we are talking about, it had good music on it, Kanye West’s pirated album, very many pictures I don’t want the world to see, especially if I become famous, and all you can tell me is to be happy? Ehh…..

Black people too can be racist, and pretty good at it

Few people can admit they loved Obama because of his color

Just a few days back, I watched Ugandans make the United States elections a big thing here. Almost each and every media house, village Chairman and lecturers were getting their minds on explaining the college vote to whoever cared to listen.

The US elections as we came to learn, is the true mockery of democracy, I mean this is the only country where your vote doesn't really count and the winner doesn't need the majority of the vote. I doubt whether those who voted from Uganda were even considered, if Obama was declared a winner even without the results of some states........

Since this election trail started last year, I've been baffled by the fact that various Africans were interested in the outcome. For the first one in 2008, I clearly understood the enthusiasm but for the second one! I was merely confused.

Now, I usually tell people that the world has been unfair to two types of people and these are men and whites. In an example of man being abused by the wife, no one will mind the case but if a woman, say, a minister was abused by the husband and it becomes a national issue.

This also applies to the white people; a simple statement by a white dude can easily be blown out of proportion to label it a racist remark unlike the straight forward statements by black people.

In a certain way the world has been forced to think that white people can be racist but not black people and the sad thing is that this notion is all over the place. That’s why Jay-Z can openly organize an event where they will stop all white people from accessing and, that’s okay, in the same way Kanye West can snatch a white Taylor Swift's microphone at an award show and still gets forgiven.

Its only blacks with a television station (BET)and three award shows celebrating entirely Black people's music, which no one is complaining about yet, if some one started an all white entertainment TV you will hear everyone scream racist.

Now this came out to play during the American elections, many African countries and their locals came out to awash Obama with a lot of praise, they praised his record as president (which record they had no idea of) the others, especially media houses came out to defend his record for the past for years and the four years he's yet to begin, others went on to rank him as the best American president ever.

I watched all the drama unfold and I couldn't stop to wonder why Africans were so into this election.

Was it because he had the very best interests for Africa? Was it because he was the smarter of the two candidates? Or it was because he is black and Romney is white?

Much as few can admit, many Africans and African-Americans supported Obama for a sole reason that he's black. Some even said it in statements like: “we are getting the blood brother a second term”, some were more blunt like: “he's a Blackman like me” and for them that didn't sound racist, yet the same answer by a white in regard to Mitt Romney would have been met with a quick question “so you don't support president Obama because he's black?”, then the person would be labeled racist.

I can't say I supported either Obama or Romney because I barely cared about the outcome, not that I hated him, am just one of the few Africans who came to their senses and learnt that however much we may want to posses him, Obama is American. He won't lift and bring the entire Wall Street to Kenya or Africa so people should get over themselves.

That said, I didn't like the way the African press was biased while showing updates of this campaign, I understand there are many people who didn't watch any of Mitt Romney's speech but got updates of what and where Obama was. On my part I feel that was a bit racist because if you are Ugandan TV station gaining neither from the Republicans nor Democrats, why are you sticking to covering only one person's campaign trail.

I watched in shock as pastors and politicians, who have been so vocal against Obama, (I hear he supports gay rights) those people were busy celebrating his win and chanting “son of our land”.

Yet, as all that goes on, none of them feels they were being racist towards the white Romney, I even asked a  friend what if Obama was white would she support him? Her answer was that she wouldn't care about the election. She strongly thinks whites are racists, and she's not.

My face book account was ambushed with insults after I posted that I didn't care whether Obama won or lost, one person actually questioned my loyalty to “mother Africa” and even asked if I was white. Now that was a racist judgment that suggests since am black, I must lose my self in support of another Blackman even when I don't like what he says.

Africans can be racist to the extent that if Obama was to stand for president in Kenya, they could have sidelined him for being half-caste.  In Uganda where many partied to celebrate him, Obama would have been castigated and, his political opponents would have labeled him with racist names like Mukyotala.

Much as Africa couldn't wait for America to get a black president, can you imagine that apart from Zambia who recently got a white Vice President, no black African country has voted, elected or chosen a white or an Indian resident as president since they got independence...over to you.