By Ian Ortega
I was walking through Kyambogo University yesterday when I sighted the Guild President cruising by on a Bodaboda. Then I looked around and saw that everyone was staring at him, as if to say, that he had committed a crime.
Not before long, people begun to question how a man of his caliber could resort to bodabodas, things known to be of the common man. I begun to worry for the next few years.
This year we’ve had a number of celebrities being dragged to court or police over unpaid debts. These included Justine Nameere of Life Stories, Coco Finger, and Desire Luzinda among others.
Yet as a public, we never sit down to realize that we actually are responsible for the illusions of a lifestyle that we force unto most of our celebrities. We expect so much of them that we lead them unto a lifestyle they can’t afford.
No wonder, we continue to have artistes who would rather starve than go around in a cheap car. No wonder most of our artistes would rather take nudes to convince the cheap ‘ogas’ of their love rather than be broke. We are leading our celebrities to their graves and to their extinction by forcing unto them a lifestyle beyond their means.
Yes, one of these days we shall kill our celebrities. We expect perfect body shapes from them, we expect them to donate huge amounts. Look at how we are quick to release condolence contribution lists when someone influential dies. I don’t want to be part of the crowd that will kill our celebrities.
I don’t want to judge them and assume them to be something that they can’t be. They are as human as we are. They also have financial problems and are even more lonely than most of us. If we keep seeing them as gods, we shall be shocked to wake up when the so-called gods have lost their lives to drugs or have committed suicide because they couldn’t handle the heat in the kitchen.
One of these days, I confess, a day nearer or far away, we shall kill one of our Ugandan celebrities. Desire Luzinda is yet to recover from the nude photo experience and so are many nude photo victims. The sooner we go slow on leading to the self-destruction of our celebrities, the better.
For once, we should accept, that many of our celebrities are not what we think of them. Many can’t even afford to pay their normal bills, many can’t even survive without a performance gig. We are actually richer than most of our celebrities yet we want them to prove otherwise.
The illusions of a celebrity life are only known to those who care to find out. Having been in this industry for some good time, I can confess, that I no longer put the celebrities on a pedestal. I no longer put them on a high ground that has no foundations, because when that high ground collapses, the celebrities fall a disastrous fall and many never recover.
May we take care as we make celebrities buy things they can’t afford, with money they don’t have to please fans who care less about their happiness.
Note: Ian Ortega is a personal development blogger at www.ortegaian.com and is on twitter: @OrtegaWasHere