Local artistes deserve better from BOT50

Mmegi Editor | Friday August 26, 2016 11:48

We said the music industry has had its challenges in the past, and it still has challenges, mainly because it is a growing industry, with very little support and training.

We noted that there is a show of shift, where locals outdo their South African counterparts during shows. This is indeed a positive milestone for local musicians.

Another positive is that the quality of local music has improved tremendously and as such local musicians give international acts stiff competition during concerts/festivals. More and more local musicians are beginning to show growth in their work, which should give them bargaining power when it comes to unfair treatment of being paid peanuts as compared to international acts.

Promoters usually give excuses that they are forced to include international acts because they are crowd pullers but of late local musicians have been proving them wrong by out performing the highly paid international acts.

The growing trend should also be an example to other local artistes who still put little effort into their music and release products which are of low quality. 

While local entertainers deserve a pat on the back for their hard work and the immense improvement they have shown, they also need to come together and force promoters to recognise their true worth. It is disheartening to see the very same people who continue to exceed expectations of night crawlers, being the ones who get paid peanuts while international acts get a larger slice of the pie, only to disappoint revellers.

On top of giving below par performances, some of these highly paid international acts will only perform one or two songs.

It does not help to starve our own hard working entertainers while enriching international acts who sometimes fail to give performances worthy of their inflated charges.  

Botswana will be celebrating 50 years of independence in 35 days. It is very sad to note that after 50 years we still do not have ‘talented’ choreographers. A local company was given the multi million pula tender and it hired a South African with P500,000 to lead Batswana during the celebrations. This is an insult to our people. We cannot claim that we do not have that talent.

We deserve better and this is our independence. That should never happen again.

 

Today’s thought

“A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.” 

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe