By Michael Woira
As I write this opinion, social media has been awash with very many negative sentiments from a number of people bashing parliament because of its decision to cancel the Nyege Nyege festival that is happening next week in Jinja.
For many people who make a living in the entertainment industry, life as they knew it abruptly changed in late March 2020 when the spread of COVID-19 forced every aspect of the business to shut down not only in Uganda but all over the World.
With theaters going dark, cancelled concerts and entertainment almost closing down fully, the global pandemic essentially brought the entertainment business to a standstill.
From a broad perspective, the entertainment industry as a whole was hit so hard.
There has never been anything like this that has affected the industry at this magnitude for all the time I have been on this universe and even the elders can confess that nothing of that kind has ever happened.
We should all know that as long as people live and breathe, they can at some point want someone or something to make them laugh and be happy and that’s why there is need for entertainment.
I am very sure that our entertainment industry generates billions and is central to tourism, travel, and hospitality.
Live entertainment such as concerts, musical productions, festivals and countless others, draw millions of people to the state each year that they are organized.
The entertainment industry has also created tens of thousands of jobs in this country thus reducing on the unemployment rates in the country.
In addition to the performing artists that we only see out front on stage performing, there are so many other jobs in the background, including stage services and construction, lighting, camera work, sound and audio, ticket sales, security and safety, makeup, hairstyling, personal services and so much more.
Our parliament should remember that the pandemic devastated the entire entertainment industry, particularly live performance venues as Ugandans were left jobless and their families helpless.
Our economy cannot fully recover until this vital industry is back on its feet and we must do all we can to assist the safe reopening of venues and get our entertainment workers back on the job.
When events like Nyege Nyege that attract millions of people are organized, I expect everyone to be in support because such events generate a lot of income for the country since very many people will be travelling here to attend. We should also look at the many gains of the event like the hotel and tourism bookings.
Since the inception of that event, a number of people have really benefited and many others have overwhelmingly achieved a lot from the various businesses that they carry out at the venue and I am a witness to that.
But like any other event, revelers cannot always be over supervised since they are all adults so a few of them end up misbehaving which isn’t good and such selective cases can’t be reason for stopping an event that benefits the whole government.
As you can also remember, on February 20 2021, Kampala was supposed to host live-streamed virtual MTV Africa Music Awards (MAMA’s) for the first time but they never happened just because some unpatriotic excited fellows went to social media and started staging campaigns to make sure the event doesn’t happen here.
As we were all happy expecting the event to happen, Teasers and various pre-sessions were already recorded, branding was already produced and adverts put everywhere, on February 4, 2021, MTV took to Twitter and announced that the awards were postponed indefinitely.
Sometimes, I laugh so loud at what happens in this country, imagine one of the Ugandans who contested for presidency whined with his comrades, Jeffrey Smith and Robert Amsterdam, wrote several letters and pleaded with the organizers not to let the event happen here but since the event was cancelled I have not seen any benefit that he gained as an individual from the jealousy he displayed with his funders.
Bobi wine’s comrade wrote “By holding a global awards show in partnership with #Uganda’s dictatorship, @MTVBaseAfrica will not only be lending itself to whitewashing the regime’s crimes but also implicate all nominated artists,”
These unpatriotic opposition leaders and their followers did not stop at just requesting for the cancellation but they went ahead with their sustained international campaign urging individual artists to boycott the event.
These cults that are making it a habit to always fight development should rethink their strategies and look at what we gain from these events and what the events do for a local Ugandan who sells food, drinks and those selling crafts and other related items.
Michael Woira is a patriotic Ugandan
