DIFFERENT CRITERIA USED FOR AWARDS IN ESWATINI

MBABANE – The awards season is upon us!

Awards are gaining popularity in Eswatini and they all use different criteria to nominate candidates as well as deciding on prices for winners. One of the most popular awards  locally include; Eswatini Gospel Awards, Writer’s Choice Awards, Social Media Awards and Jumbo Festival and Lifestyle Awards. The Gospel Music Awards seeks to celebrate Eswatini Gospel musicians and their achievements.

Writer’s Choice Awards are aimed at celebrating local writers for their writing skills and also offer them exposure for their talent while Social Media Awards are meant to appreciate everyone who plays a role in the arts and media in Eswatini. The Jumbo Festival and Lifestyle Awards is a socio-corporate event that gathers iconic personalities from all lifestyle pursuits to a hallmarking experience of celebration. This is an event epitomised by a jolly atmosphere of meet and greets celebratory toasting, empowerment keynote discussions, awards presentation, fashion and live entertainment. These awards all use a different criterion to nominate and allocate prices for winners. Eswatini Gospel Awards use a short code to nominate individuals to be part of the nominations.

Nominate

A short code is a specialised five to six-digit phone number used in one-way SMS and MMS messaging. To nominate an individual using a short code, one has to send the name of the artist that he or she wants to nominate using the short code given. The Communications Officer for Eswatini Gospel Music Awards Nhlanhla Mathunjwa shared that the public is usually the one that does the nominations using the short code and this was followed by a vetting process. “The organising team does the vetting process to see if the artist is nominated in the right category and also to see if the artist qualifies for the category. During the vetting process the artist is reviewed against the rules of the awards.

Criteria

“The main rule of the awards is finding out if the material the artist has been nominated for falls within the year of nominations or not. Once the artist is checked based on the vetting criteria, then the public can vote for the artist as five categories are then formed to enable the voting,” Mathunjwa said. The five categories are totally decided by the public,  these are; Song of the year, Artist of the year, Newcomer of the year, Best male artist, Best female artist. “There are 10 adjudicated categories which are decided by judges. The criteria used by the judges include entertainment, where artists submit their albums, song or EP. They also submit their profile and from there the judges make their decision based on entertainment value and artistic ability to name a few,” Mathunjwa said.

Influenced

He further acknowledged that they are aware about the issues of bias that the public may have about judges being able to decide the winner as the judges may be influenced. However, Mathunjwa said during the vetting, they made sure that everyone who qualified had a chance to win although the winner is decided by judges at the end. As for the Social Media Awards, Mthunzi ‘Shadow’ Zwane from Swazi Boy Entertainment shared that their criteria to nominate was through social media. These include; Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. “We usually release a poster, for example, posters for Best Photographer, then people nominate their choice under the post. We then tally all the nominations to get the total. After that we check to see who has the highest nominations to be voted on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,”said Zwane.

He went on to say that they are voted on these socials because it is where they published their names so that the public can see them and know them since they are the ones who would vote. After publishing the nominees on the socials, they then go back to see who has the most mentions and tally them so they can continue to enter the top 10 list. “From the top 10 list, we also release their pictures to the socials to start over the competition for the top 5 list, where they will then get the winner.”

Nominate

Clement Dlamini, the CEO of Writers Choice Awards said they use a website to conduct their nominations. “We have a nomination space on our website which will close on Saturday. Anyone can register someone, from those nominations we will then see who has been nominated according to the categories and then alert them to enter the competition. The website is called Swazifest.com and our website security is tight in a way that no one can try to compromise the confidentiality of our system as we have a very talented Information and Technology (IT) team,” shared Dlamini. He added that this year they have fifteen categories that are there on their website, where the public can register according to the categories that are shown on the page. To avoid corruption in the competition, they have decided to avoid the use of  judges as they may be influenced, this year they decided to let people vote for themselves without the input of a judge.

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: