TMCnet News
So We Have a New Miss Uganda...So What?(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) In case this passed you, we do have a new Miss Uganda. She's 23-year-old Human Resource Management graduate, Sylvia Namutebi, and she was crowned last Saturday at Golf Course Hotel, Kampala The icing on the cake was that there was no talk of foul play in the whole event. Last year's pageant had one of the judges of the beauty contest, Allan Kasujja, claiming that the winner, Heyzme Nansubuga, was not the contestant the judges had chosen. The judges, according to Kasujja, had picked another girl Aisha Nagudi. Previously, in 2009, the pageant also faced accusations of fraud when Maria Namiiro, a UK citizen of Ugandan ancestry, won the crown. According to the contestants, the event's organiser, Joyce Church, seemed to favour Namiiro right from the onset of the event. Both Namiiro and Church are UK citizens and Namiiro had in the same year won Miss Uganda UK, an event that was organised by Performance Production Ltd, the same company that organised Miss Uganda and was co-owned by Joyce Church and her husband. What more apart from the crown? So you can see why there was some excitement about the latest pageant. However, away from the stories of foul play that have come to describe our pageants, therein, within the whole idea of having ladies parade in front of a crowd to be judged by a selected panel, lies one of the biggest disappointments about the Miss Uganda franchise. What value addition do these winners bring to their communities courtesy of their win? What responsibilities to society, comes with winning the Miss Uganda crown? How beneficial is it to Uganda when one is crowned as the most beautiful woman in the land? You have all heard them proclaim that they shall help the needy and fix a hospital ward the moment they are crowned. Many of such proclamations, however, do not go far. In her acceptance speech last year, winner Heyzme Nansubuga promised to help get rid of the street children. The current winner Namutebi has promised a maternity ward at St Francis Hospital in Jinja and a recreational centre for the youth with the venue for that centre yet to be mentioned. If we are to look at how other countries have fared with their pageantries, we need to take a leaf from them. These pageants show that winners are not just beautiful faces. Take India for instance. Once a winner is picked the focus is on making her be able to win at the Miss World pageant. The winner is groomed, trained and turned into a person worthy of taking on the competition and winning it. India has for that matter had many of their contestants winning the Miss World and Miss Universe contests. One of these winners was Aishwarya Rai. She became Miss India in 1994 and won the Miss World pageant in the same year. Rai's career was propelled from then on. She started an acting career and gained the attention of Bollywood. In 2003, she became the first Indian actress to be a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival. She is currently the brand ambassador for The Eye Bank Association of India's nationwide campaign to promote eye donation in India. This is what ideally the winners of these pageants should do, use their win and fame to give something back to the country. Closer to home, Miss Kenya 2005, Cecilia Mwangi, has been very fundamental in the fight for the eradication of jiggers in Kenya rural areas that she was not only made the Project Ambassador for the NGO, spearheading the eradication of jigger infestation in Kenya, Ahadi Kenya Trust, she is also nicknamed the "jigger ambassador." Such is her resolve to help the community. Mwangi has won several awards, among them, a leadership management award from USAID, a service award from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and a humanitarian of the year award as well as presidential awards. Mwangi made her win relevant to her community. So why can't the Ugandan beauties mirror such? And isn't that part of their docket as winners? "The problem is with the organisers of these pageants. They fail to guide the girls to what their responsibilities are," says Brenda Nanyonjo the Director of Kezzi Entertainment, the organisers of the just concluded Miss Uganda contest. "You find that after the lights and cameras are switched off when the final event is done, the girls are left on their own. These girls are young, they need direction," she says. Mark Kaheru, public relations director in the PR firm, Media Analyst and former PR of UTL, a company that sponsored quite a number of Miss Uganda pageants, believes it's a wider problem than that. "The girls are not only abandoned by the organisers of these pageants, but literally by everyone, be it corporate companies, individuals, the media, name it. For example, Dora Mwima got attached to the breast cancer fight but was literally never supported by anyone. Same goes for Monica Kasyate," he says. Kasyate, who was crowned Miss Uganda in 2008, proclaimed, on winning the title, that she would help the disadvantaged children, especially in rural areas. "So I got down and wrote a proposal on how I believed I would help out. The organisers at the time didn't support me in helping me find organisations that would buy into my idea," she says. That didn't deter her. "I sent my proposal to UNFPA and they liked it. They took me on board as their ambassador and every time they travelled upcountry, I went with them and helped them in their work with the disadvantaged children." Charity work an essential part of it all Charity work and beauty pageants are intertwined. They are a marriage of convenience. To further show this importance, the CEO of Miss World Limited, the global organiser of the Miss World pageants, Julia Morley, in February this year, castigated the organisers of Miss Singapore beauty pageants for their poor organisational standards of the event as not being active in charity work within Singapore. If the event remains one of parading girls in bikinis and replying short and abstract answers to the judging panels to questions like, "What do you want to become in future?" then to many the pageant will remain empty and irrelevant as a social tool to change society. Copyright The Monitor. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |