<<Print>>

Miss Malaika Ghana is a beauty pageant that seeks to celebrate and honour young ladies with brains and beauty. Over the years though, sometimes, the pageant has ended ends in controversy in terms of who deserves to win and didn�t win and who won but didn�t deserve to win, this seem to have been rectified. Now it appears that, all the credibility issues have been worked on and thoroughly dealt with. Presently, the pageant has moved to a stage where it becomes difficult to pinpoint who is likely to win as a pundit. This is minus the diehard fans, for them, their favourite deserves to win, whether they are good or not. This year, the above came to play. It was extremely difficult to identify who among the ladies deserves to win from day one. From being selected from the over hundreds of wannabes to the 16 ladies who started the series proper in August, through to the 10 finalists and then to the top 5 at the grand finals. At the end of the night, however, Miss Eirene Nsudoom Binabiba, a 19-year-old student of the University of Ghana, Legon was crowned Miss Malaika. Eirene Binabiba may have been crowned queen for this year but I made this observation at the final event and I intend to share with readers. The good, the bad and the ugly of Miss Malaika 2014? Let�s go! Attendance: For a company that prides itself as the biggest event organisers in Ghana and rightly so, I guess it should not be difficult for them to pack the auditorium of the National Theatre. On the same night, the Miss Malaika pageant was competing for relatively the same patrons with the Legends and Legacy Ball which was taking place at the Accra International Conference Centre. Initially, it felt as if the Legends and Legacy Ball had beaten Miss Malaika to patronage as at the advertised time, the auditorium of the National Theatre wasn�t packed to capacity. But before the show commenced after 9pm, the seats had found people to rest in them.The show was well attended. Attendance was massive. As to why people attend event late, I have no idea. However, my worry is having two big events on the same day at almost the same time. If there is a way that event organisers will come together and think in that direction, I will welcome it. Late start: I have a strong feeling that, majority of the time, when an event starts late, to a large extent, patrons can partly be blamed for it. But what happens after a show had started late determines the mood of patrons. For these particular Malaika patrons, though the show started late, each of them was well entertained, thanks to a certain DJ Black. The DJ Black Factor: Until the show got underway, patrons who had sat down for hours needed something to appease them. And guess what, DJ Black was that something. Perhaps what distinguishes him from his colleague DJs is his ability to deliver the best songs at the right time. �Forget the delays�, DJ Black might have said in his head as he started dishing out the songs that actually forced patrons to forget about the late start of the show. You can�t say Miss Malaika 2014 grand finale was successful and not mention DJ Black. Dumsor: Imagine that, after all the delays, when the show finally started, the Electricity Company of Ghana visited the venue with their unannounced lights out popularly known as �dumsor�. This was after DJ Black had started playing the best of songs and patrons responding with their dance moves. Power was, however, restored after three minutes, that I believe infuriated DJ Black more to play good songs to excite the patrons. �Dumsor� or no �dumsor�, the show turned out to be the best so far. Naa Ashorkor Factor: When Sharon, Anita, Stephanie, Eirene and Joyce were announced by Naa Ashorkor as the top 5 delegates to move on to the next stage of the competition, I noticed something unusual. I noticed that, Naa Ashorkor who was standing close to Sharon started talking to her for some seconds. A patron seated next to me drew my attention to that, when she murmured to her friend that, it wasn�t right for the MC to talk to a contestant on stage if it�s not something for everybody to hear. �This is not right. She�s not supposed to be talking to anyone like she�s doing.� I gladly concurred. Later, when I enquired from Naa Ashorkor on phone what she said to Sharon, she told me she doesn�t remember exactly what they spoke about. I do believe her and I feel she will not repeat that. Is your question answered? Aside the beauty, one determining factor about Miss Malaika is a delegate�s brains. I believe that�s why the question and answer segment is there to determine which of the beautiful ladies is the smartest. So I was surprised that, Naa Ashorkor repeatedly asked the judges if their questions have been well answered by the contestants whenever each of them answered a question from a judge. I was more than taken aback because I thought; depending on how the ladies answered a question determines who is more intelligent than the other since they are all beautiful. So I was wondering, what if any of the judges had said no. Question before the main question: Regardless of all that I noticed about Naa Ashorkor, I was generally happy with her performance. Before she asked the contestants what they will do if they win the crown, she asked them a random question like �arrange this in order of importance-health, wealth and family�. I can�t confirm if it was part of the show but I feel it helped many of the contestants to calm down, especially when many of them confirmed being nervous and tensed up. I want to end by saying that, this year I realised that even patrons whose favourite contestant didn�t make the top 5 stayed to the very end of the show. That�s what we all want every year or?