The Saturday Club Mega Fest at Namboole was a success story, with thousands of party lovers attending.
However, there were a lot of things that almost failed the show. From starting late to poor sound system. Then some of the musicians who had been scheduled to perform at the venue also failed to take to stage.
Patra’s performance, which most of the female fans (mostly dressed in Patra shorts) were looking towards to partying, was way below their expectations.
She was failed by the sound system that made her performance, which was characterised by lip synching made it a mere joke. She was so disappointed and left only after 15 minutes.
At one time, the frustrated revellers started throwing plastic bottles at the comedians who were on stage. Neither could the warning from the police nor jokes could calm them.
The bottle throwing only stopped after the comedians left stage, and consequently normalised after Bebe Cool, followed by Shaggy came to stage.
Shaggy left stage but again it took over 20 minutes for the next artiste, Burna Boy to come onto stage.
The crowd waited for Mafikizolo, who were only performers who hadn’t been on stage but they didn’t show up until when the revellers lost patience and started exiting the stadium.
On Sunday word started moving that the South African singers refused to sing because they had a show the following day at Serena Hotel.
However, Club Pilsner, the organisers of the fest denied this in their Sunday press statement.
“We apologise that one of the international acts, Mafikizolo, was unable to perform. The show was meant to kick off at midday but due to the heightened terror alerts, the security sweep of the entire venue took longer than anticipated,” Club wrote.
It added that they were later at around 2am informed about some security concerns and were advised to wrap up the show within the hour.
“Therefore Mafikizolo were unable to perform because their set was in the excess of an hour.”
But according to insiders who were back stage, the South African duo refused to take to stage citing “unproffessional organisation”.
They accused the organisers of having kept them backstage for over four hours to go on stage and a poor sound system.
Burna Boy also Sunday took to twitter to express his disatifaction with the organisers.
“We love our Ugandan people and for this reason alone, we will definitely be back for a proper Burna Boy show. We were kept waiting for hours backstage, when it was time to perform there wasn’t even a mixer. But we soldiered through. We will be back!” Burna Boy tweeted.
“Thanks to all the fans who came out last night. We faced major challenges, bad sound and poor organization backstage. We soldiered through.”
Meanwhile, Club also clarified on Chameleone’s failure to turn up. “It was also unfortunate that our own Chameleon was unable to perform. He was unable to secure return transportation from a gig in South Sudan.”
