Music is bigger in Ghana than it is in Sierra Leone

Mijay, a young female artiste from Sierra Leone, says music is bigger here in Ghana than in her home country.

In an interview on the award-winning entertainment talk show, ‘The Late Nite Celebrity Show’, she explained why she moved to Ghana to do music.

“Music-wise Ghana is out there and Sierra Leone is trying. When you think of African music, you can’t even talk about Sierra Leone because we don’t have people representing us out there,” she said.

“Even though Ghana is facing its own challenges in the industry which happens everywhere, ours is that the music is just within, it’s not going out there. We have people that want to push it but the support from home is poor. They have an attitude of discriminating against musicians based outside Sierra Leone and those at home, claiming superiority over those based outside so it’s hard for the music to go out there,” she added

According to her, unlike Ghana, music is ‘each one for himself, God for us all’ practice in Sierra Leone. There is no help from investors.

“Nobody is thinking about entertainment, so we just do it out of love, everybody is doing their own thing individually. There are no schools for arts and it’s even hard to find a management team. People have money to invest into the music but they still see music as something done by non-serious idle people. But in Ghana at least you have people who will say this or that person is doing well so let me help him or her,” she revealed.

“In Ghana, there are platforms where underground artistes are given opportunities to perform, we don’t have something like that back home, so it’s hard, individually we cant push the music far, we can only achieve that together. This is why our music is not out there even though we have very good music.”

By: Susan Amoako Agyemang