The night of West African hits on Project Fame last weekend was filled with drama as 5 students were put on probation by the judges. However, before we get into all that I must register my complete disappointment with the choice of songs for the contestants. When I heard that they were going to perform hit songs from West Africa, I was like, great! I knew I was going to hear some renditions from the repertoire of some of the best musicians out of the west coast.

However it turned out be a celebration of Nigerian musicians as 12 out of the 15 songs performed were all by Nigerian artists. Either the organizers are conceited, thinking that Nigeria is bigger than the rest of West Africa; or they are completely clueless about the remarkable list of great musicians out of the sub-region. Whatever the case, it was a poor account on the ‘academy’. In the least, contestants from the Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone could have performed a song each from their countries instead of being forced to sing songs by Nigerian artists.

Anyway, here were the highlights from the weekend. On Saturday, Sierra Leone’s Brenda was the second contestant to be evicted as the public voted to save Praise and the faculty opted to save Dorcas. The vote of the fellow students was in favor of Wilmot so Brenda had to bid the academy farewell.

On Sunday, the not so West African thingy happened and all 15 contestants pulled off some nice performances but the night without a doubt belonged to Nii who was lucky enough to have a song from his home country, Ghana. He tore off the roof with a stunning rendition of VIP’s ‘Ahomka Wo Mu’ which was a massive hit Nigeria some three years ago. No wonder he had all the audience up singing and dancing. So you see, it was all about Naija!

After all was said and done, someone had to go on probation, and here came the drama. The judges put 5 people instead of the usual 4 on probation because they felt that the performances of those 5 students were not up to scratch on the night. This angered Nollywood screen goddess, Joke Silver, who is also the Principal of the academy who vented her anger. I couldn’t tell if she was really serious or she just felt she was filming on location. She couldn’t believe that, after the judges had concluded that the ‘West Africa night’ was amazing, they would go back on their word and put 5 students on probation. This sparked a childish confrontation between the faculty and the judges but at the end of the day the fact remains that Sopriye, Wilmot, Dorcas, Ijeoma and Bisola are on probation and one or perhaps two of them will be evicted this week.