TAKEAWAYS FROM THE JUST CONCLUDED FESPAD

One word would sum the just concluded Pan African Dance Festival at Amahoro stadium, and that would be boring. To break it down expeditiously and to understand it fully, we can compare it to other past festivals and our above description will be rather lenient. Right from the word go when the festivities began, everything went from bad to worse. The bad weather did play a role, yes, but organizers badly failed us even more. Here we look at some of the few things we learnt from FESPAD 2013.

Money does not necessarily guarantee success

Beenie Man performs at FESPAD 2013: Foreign artists are paid mega millions of money while their Rwandan counterparts are hardly recognized by their own.

True to the above testimonial, it was evident how a lot of money was splashed in preparations of the festival, but to the dismay of many that did not reflect the success it was supposed to. From the decorations to the guest invitees that included dancehall king Beenie Man, the expenses incurred would only dwarf the vocabulary extravagant. I bet Riderman performed a zillion times better than the Jamaican.

RDB to blame

Rwanda Development Board is one of the leading institutions in Rwanda that has many responsibilities that include among others, wooing investors, organizing the annual Gorilla naming ceremony and issuance of Certificates of incorporation for private investors. That said, the institution should swiftly hand back the responsibilities of organizing FESPAD to the Ministry of Sports and Culture. The disorganization that marred the festival was evidently discernible even to the blind eye, and one can’t stop but pile the blame on RDB. Also, how do you explain that out of over forty countries which were supposed to participate, only five appeared? Big question mark!

Indecisiveness

A Burundian traditional dance group performs despite the low turnout at FESPAD 2013

At the end of it all, the five countries were all awarded certificates as having participated at the festival, but lack of clear-cut decision on who was the actual winner left everyone confused. The argument was that each country had its own unique culture and as a result they were all winners. But even if that was the basis of the argument, how about minor details such as choreography and on-stage performances? If this, among others, was adopted as a benchmark to judge and award marks, we would have had an outright winner and eventual runners-up. Once again this was a major blunder that made the festival a failure.