Bring Back Our “Ghana Music Awards”

It is the 17^th Vodafone Ghana Music Awards. A time to celebrate the best of the best in our music industry. Unfortunately, we might yet experience another poor and immature international award show in Ghana.

According to what is on the Ghana Music Awards website, “They started in 2000 to honour Ghana’s hard working musicians”. But what do we see today? The organizers have traded the awards for tokens such that, Awards go to the most untalented and the most hardworking are being neglected.

Few days ago the award for VGMA UNSUNG was given to Adoma. Rather disappointing, considering the fact that most of her work are based on remixes and samples. Where is the originality? With all due respect to Adoma, Where is the Hard work VGMA claims to be awarding? In fact some have said every artist in that category is not worth their salt.

Sidelining someone like Shatta Wale, well renowned for his hard work (A fact even his critics agree with) , to say the least, disappointing. True he disrespected or made untoward suggestions concerning the organizers of the VGMA’s but frankly, not having the biggest artist in Ghana at the nations show piece music awards show doesn’t make sense at all.

We have other big names when it comes to Ghana music boycotting the awards simply because their hard work was not recognized. Someone like Edem called the awards a big joke and asked his fellow musicians who were nominated not to take the categories seriously. Other top artiste also spoke bitterly about the awards and some won’t even bother to attend the events.

We wonder what GHAMRO, MUSIGA and the other musical bodies are doing. Could it be they don’t realize what’s going on with the music awards? Don’t they have a say when it comes to the VGMA’S?

So can we at ghanathings.com conclude that, The VGMA is no more about hard work but rather the choice of the organizers? And are we going to sit and watch as hardworking talents get ignored for rather untalented artist to shine?