NEA Founder: M.I. And P Square BET Nomination Is An Insult To Sade

Tope Esan

The biggest news in Nigeria if not West Africa can rightly be said to be the nomination M.I. and P Square for the 2010 BET award which some still could not believe. It came to our notice that Mr. Tope Esan, the founder and executive producer of NEA (Nigerian Entertainment Award) is not happy with what many Nigerians are extremely happy about.

We stumbled across an article Mr. Esan submitted to Ladybrille Magazine over a month ago. It reads: “while i am happy with the MI and P Square BET nomination, it is pretty interesting that the Nigerian media is overly excited about this nomination and have not come out to criticize the fact that Estelle, Corinne Bailey Rae and Sade were nominated in same category- international category. To me, that is so flawed and quite frankly a slap in the face of an artiste like safe, i mean common.
This is the case where we are all excited that BET has co-signed Nigerian entertainment and forgetting the bigger picture (the insult) on Sade. After how many years of competing in mainstream, BET goes and nominate her as international (artist) this is really an insult”.

In 2009, at the Nigerian Entertainment Awards where M.I. lost the best international act category to Iceberg Slim which raised a lot of controversy.

The title of the article heightened speculation that Mr. Esan has a situation with the rapper M.I.but the NEA founder went on to clarify his critique was targeted at the organizers and not the nominees.

Quite clearly the NEA producer would want to see Sade contending for another category with the likes of Beyonce and others, and not international act which has the likes of P Square and M.I. in it as he went on to comment that “it just doesn’t make sense for Sade to be competing in that category. I will be perfectly fine if she got a Best R&B Artist of the year not international category.”