Amapiano vocalist Dudu “Lady Du” Ngwenya lambasted the 28th South African Music Awards (Samas) on Twitter and raised questions about how the winner of Record of the Year was selected.
Risa Communications Manager and SAMAs spokesperson Lesley Mofokeng in conversation with IOL Entertainment addressed the noise around the awards.
Lady Du in her tweets questioned how Nhlanhla Nivo Ndimande could be the creative director for the SAMAs yet he is Musa Keys’ manager.
Do you know why a lot of us didn’t go or even perform there? Because we already knew who was going to get what!!! The set up was too obvious Stay woke niyeke ukus yenza amabari!
— Ladydu (@Ladydu_sa) August 29, 2022
Mina I don’t keep quite because I don’t work for people that control my brand! I’m independent. 🙏
Mofokeng told IOL Entertainment that Nivo declared his relationship with Musa Keys from the onset of their working relationship and this is something that organisers acknowledged, accepted and approved.
He said the nominees for Record of the Year, which is one of the awards’ biggest categories, are shortlisted by a list based on Radio Monitor, which tracks a song’s performance across radio stations.
“The top 10 gets voted for by the public, these votes are audited by PwC after that they are given to us. We don’t even know till the night, as during the show we are busy promoting the categories.
“The results get announced at the end of the show when Record of the year is announced and that’s the process that happened here,” Mofokeng said.
“I fail to understand how Nivo could influence that process,” he said.
Addressing Makhadzi’s claims about her performance and the challenges she experienced, Mofokeng said “it’s a complex story” as he shed light on the situation from an organiser’s stand point.
“We received a request from Makhadzi's management at the Samas, requesting for an extended time for her performance,” he shared.
The “Ghamama” hitmaker had been allocated two minutes in the medley performance.
“It’s a medley, it's not one person performing, it’s a medley, it has to flow within five or six minutes. It’s a TV show, it’s time sensitive, it needs to keep moving,” Mofokeng said.
Following Makhadzi’s management request, a meeting was held to see if her request would be granted with stakeholders involved with making the TV production a success.
“The response was that the show has already been locked in, the music is already timed to images that will be appearing on TV, the music that Makhadzi is going to dance to, taken from her song, had already been sent to the production company for approval,” Mofokeng said.
“Unfortunately it became impossible at that point to extend the time, simply because of how the show was structured and the timing that was in place. We are at the stage of rehearsals, where camera angles have been locked in and confirmed.
“We would have loved for Makhadzi to perform for longer but because of TV and production technical things we couldn’t accommodate the request,” he said.
As for Makhadzi’s claim of using a cellphone to rehearse, Mofokeng was unable to comment but did say he saw her rehearsing a few times at the Sun City Superbowl before the big night.
Mofokeng said during their creative workshops during the planning stages, the point of amapiano acts being unable to make the awards was raised by Nivo and there were several conversations that took place about how they could be included in the show.
He said: “There were attempts to bring in amapiano stars that were overseas, but there were challenges of how this can be done while they were overseas.
“In terms of zoom link, it just would not work in terms of a TV production and in the end it just didn’t work out. That’s why some of them had their songs performed and their collaborators performed some parts.
“But we would have loved to have amapiano stars performing on the stage, it just was not logistically possible to pull off,” he said.