Miss Ghana under a cloud

The Miss Ghana pageant, the oldest among its kind in the country, has gone through tough times. From leasing of the brand to its re-lease, the pageant appears to have found its bearing; and now is grappling with other pageants to take its rightful place.

But in all of this, there has been too little to read about the mother of all pageants which opened the door for all other pageants to come in. How does that sound? Terrible right?

I don’t know how accurate this saying is but growing up, I occasionally heard people say that, to keep a secret from an African man, you must keep that secret in a book because the African man does not read, which means he will not be able to discover whatever secret is being kept away from him.

On my television screen currently is a promo of new beauty pageant asking young intelligent and brainy ladies to register to be part of the new pageant which is set to roll soon. By the time you finish reading this piece, the pageant would have been done with and a winner declared or perhaps it will be in its final stages depending on the time table of the organisers.

As I watched the promo I began to bemoan how cheap pageants have become in Ghana. The Miss Ghana beauty pageant, I learn, was launched in the Kwame Nkrumah years. For a pageant as big as Miss Ghana the information available to people who are curious to know more about it is not encouraging at all.

Due to our inability to preserve old information, when starting this piece, the only place I could fall on for information was the internet. Even with that, there was little information. The information I got was very scanty and it didn’t even tell you enough about the pageant considered as the biggest and oldest in the history of Ghana.

However, this is how a quick Google of Miss Ghana Beauty Pageant history search appeared on Wikipedia: “The Miss Ghana Pageant is an annual pageant organized by Media Whizz Kids to select Ghana’s representative to the annual Miss World Pageant.

What! Three years ago, the above information would have been very useful to the people who care enough to know but today as I put down this few words, that information has become very irrelevant and incorrect.

This is very shocking because, yes the pageant was hosted by Media Whizz Kidz for many years but the organizational baton has been handed over to Exclusive Events Limited who celebrated two years of having the franchise of the pageant on July 20 with Miss Guiseppina Baafi being declared as Miss Ghana 2013.

In fact, ever since they acquired the franchise, Exclusive Events Limited under the management of Miss Ghana 2004, Inna Mariam Patty did well with their maiden edition in 2012 when Naa Okailey Shooter was crowned as the winner. More positives were recorded in that year.

Inviting the Miss World Organization team to your country is not easy. Convincing them on why they should come down is another thing, something that Inna and her team seem to have done easily.

When the Miss World team arrived in Ghana the first time, I was part of the entourage that paid a visit to the Central Region including the visiting the Regional Minister as well as opinion leaders.

The Miss World team was present again this year for the Charity Ball and this year’s final. I’m very certain that, yet again the information will not appear on the internet.

I understand that, the Miss World pageant hosting baton will fall on Africa in 2016. Leading the pack is South Africa and Ghana. I know Ghana is nursing the dream of hosting the Miss World Pageant in 2016 as it was indicated in the Minister’s speech at the final.

I also know that lobbying is currently on-going, so in case the team decides to rely on the internet to read more about our pageant, I can only imagine how the outdated information on the internet will do to our bid.

Having followed other pageants over the years, I subscribe that without any doubt, Miss Ghana is the oldest and arguably the biggest pageant.

What made it the biggest and the oldest beauty pageant in Ghana? Is it because it was the first to be launched? Several questions but I’m too young to know and the internet didn’t help either. I was educated that Miss Monica Amekoafia was the first Miss Ghana but I wasn’t told Naa Okailey Shooter was Miss Ghana 2012.

Inna and her team have revamped the once fallen Miss Ghana. It look better organized now from every department. The prizes for the winners look appealing and tempting as compared to the joke of a prize that other pageant winners receive or sometimes winners are not presented with their prizes in time or at all.

In whatever way one looks at it, the one area that must be given the needed attention is the scanty information about the pageant on the web. Now internet is the thing.