AS the date for the first edition of the Fiesta annual music show draws closer, organisers have announced that internationally renowned Jamaican reggae band, Morgan Heritage, and Tanzanian Bongo flava star Diamond Platnumz will be the headline acts.

The long-awaited concert is going down on Sunday at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Nyamata. It will also include performances from Vanessa Mdee and Chegge, both from Tanzania, local artistes Yvan Buravan, Charly & Nina, and DJ Pius.

It will be the first time that the Fiesta music festival will be staged outside Tanzania, where it has been happening consistently for the last sixteen years. Fiesta has been one of the signature and high profile music events on the Tanzanian entertainment calendar.

Previous editions have drawn such international mega stars as Jay Z, Ludacris, 50 Cent, Kat de Luna, Rick Ross and TI among others.

"This is the first time Fiesta is happening outside Tanzania, so we’re starting Fiesta Rwanda as the first Fiesta outside Tanzania. But it will be happening every year in the summer,” explained Lee Ndayisaba, the organiser of the event. 

"Fiesta has a good reputation in terms of doing A-list events. We want to make it the biggest event ever. We will have the biggest stage that Rwandans have never seen before,” Ndayisaba added.

Construction of the stage will begin on Wednesday afternoon through Saturday, a day before the event.

On Tuesday afternoon, the manager of the Morgan Heritage band jetted into the country ahead of the band, which is expected to touch down at Kigali International Airport this afternoon, June 29.

"I’m Rwandan, but I’ve done Fiesta for so many years outside Rwanda. So I asked myself -if it can work elsewhere then why not home? I have a very good rapport with many artists and we talk so many times. We chose Nyamata because there’s never been anything in

Nyamata, so we decided to build something new other than the regular venues where people do events. The mayor and the police in Nyamata have been extremely kind and helpful to us; the mayor actually thanked us for organizing an event that will bring so many people to Nyamata. We sold about 1,400 tickets on day one and surprisingly we sold these tickets to a few companies as opposed to individuals,” Ndayisaba explained the move to bring the event to Rwanda, in an out-of-town location. 

"Next year we won’t do just one event but five, across the country,” he added. 

The event is organised by Prime Time Promotions, a local Events company in partnership with RwandAir, Akagera Aviation and Tigo Rwanda.

The event started sixteen years ago in Tanzania, known at the time as Summer Jam, before evolving into Fiesta a few years later. BCBC, a musical group from the DRC was the headline act for the first edition.