Is TPF becoming East Africa’s Project shame?

This year’s edition of Tusker Project Fame had its grand finale on Sunday evening, with proceedings that have continued to confuse and misguide music activity in the country ever since it was mooted six seasons ago. The winner, Hope Irakoze from Burundi, like his predecessors on this Sh5 million jackpot, will be a hard act to sell. He has a good voice but his music is all wrong -- therein lies the tragedy of this multi million TV show. With a budget exceeding Sh700 million per edition, TPF series must be the costliest music show to be produced in the East African region but regrettably, music success has eluded its winners and this begs the question: What is the matter with it? Ideally, the winners have it all made: cash, publicity in five countries and a recording contract with South African major labels, Gallo and now Sony. This ought to have made their passage to fame and success easy. But nothing seems to work, not even locally. Most of the contestants faded into oblivion immediately the show was over. Hope does not inspire hope either. Conceptually, the project is fundamentally flawed. It lacks a recording industry orientation and whatever comes out of it contradicts the reality that makes music careers worldwide. It does not take much to understand the folly of the show -- the cultural detachment from the region that it covers. For a region striving to cultivate its own music identity and therefore a niche in the mainstream of global market, TPF has persistently pushed music to the path of neo-colonialism that it ought to have been trying to pull it out of. In essence this ought to be a trademark of East Africa, but has increasingly reflected mostly American influence with an occasional back-handed compliment to East Africa. This approach may help win the prize money at the TPF but as time has shown, it has no benefits to a music career. Indeed a growing number of young artistes are seeing the travesty of playing other people’s music and are moving boldly to embrace their own and it is paying dividends. The growth of Ohangla and the variations of Benga in Kenya is testimony of the delectable trend in Kenya and the other countries in the region have their own stories. Agencies

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Is TPF becoming East Africa’s Project shame?