The 2008 Glo CAF Awards held in Lagos, Nigeria Tuesday, was a marriage between some of the best footballers in Africa and some top-notch African musicians. The glitzy award ceremony hosted by Christopher Bongo and Bimbo Oloyede was not all about honoring the best footballers and teams on the continent; it was splashed with delightful performances by great African musicians like Yvonne Chaka Chaka of South Africa, King Mensah of Togo and the amazing Yossou N’ Dour.

Nigeria’s dynamic R&B duo P-Square, Ishmael from South Africa and a host of other musicians also joined the train to put some life into the otherwise boring ceremony filled with long speeches and technical hitches. Perhaps the organizers should have paid a little more attention to the technical issues such as cueing playbacks properly, checking microphones et cetera instead of turning the event into a promotional campaign for Glo, the title sponsors of the awards.

I wonder if the organizers watched the recent FIFA World Player of the Year Awards. even on that grand scale, everything fell into place. It has become a well known fact that Africans do not have regard for time but it is about time we started turning things around. The event didn’t start on time, and when it finally did, most of the time was spent paying respect to people who really didn’t matter on the night for rewarding African football. It took chiefs and other dignitaries called to present awards almost 5 minutes to get up and get on stage. Only in Africa! Anyway, the award ceremony itself was great and almost every winner deserved his/her honor. If I had my way, Ghana would have won the best African team supporters’ award. Wasn’t anyone watching the Ghana CAN 2008 tournament? LOL!!