Before the drama surrounding her personal life unfolded last week Friday, Tiwa Savage sat down for an interview with Urban 96FM’s program ‘Urban Superstar Top 10′ .

In it, the singer talked about her 10 favourite songs of the moment, motherhood, adoption plans etc. but cleverly side-stepped a potential banana skin when she was asked about her colleague Seyi Shay, deflecting the question by congratulating Davido for recently joining the Pepsi Nigeria team instead.

Tiwa Savage –

See I knew you were going to drop this in anyway, everybody has heard! What? Am I happy for Davido? Of course I love him, He’s absolutely fantastic.

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Seyi Shay belongs to the same Pepsi team but she wasn’t as clever in a March interview with Ebuka Obi-Uchendu when she was asked about her relationship with Tiwa –

I don’t really know her, so (smirk)… I don’t know her personally, I don’t really have many friends in the music industry.

They are my colleagues – we say hello, we say goodbye, we invite each other to different things and functions that are happening. That’s how it is with the females in the industry.

 

I’d pay top naira to be in a room full of Pepsi executives listening to Seyi’s interview. But Seyi didn’t need to say much, her body language spoke volumes already. When Ebuka let her know that the next topic to be discussed was the constant comparisons between her and Tiwa Savage, even though it’s a topic that has been discussed several times, Seyi replied  –

So let’s not talk about it (laugh).

She would later talk about her admiration for Tiwa and the Mavins crew but the PR damage was already done by then. Seyi doesn’t have to like Tiwa, they don’t have to get along but you can tell by her attempts to clean things up that Seyi knows she don sh*t for church.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been Seyi Shay’s only goof in recent months, she has been having a torrid time with interviews.

In January, she stumbled over the pronunciation of “T-W-O” albeit after being tripped by presenter Chuey Chu. Granted Chuey has made a name for himself by conducting brief walk-through interviews where he boxes his interviewees into tight corners with trick questions but Seyi Shay has arguably been his most famous scalp so far.

Last month, she was in a funny situation again. In an interview with Hip TV’s “Trending”, hosted by Nancy Isime, the singer was asked to explain what EP meant and she confidently said –

Of course an EP could stand for electric package.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BEVz6Mdhf62/

 

That could be true but in the context of music and musical projects, the correct answer would have been “Extended Play”, a shocking mistake for a professional singer.

Then, just about a week ago Seyi Shay came up with another cringe-worthy interview moment when she debated Kid Konnect and other members of DZRPT’s “Breakfast Club” about the origin of the Nigerianized English word “phoné”. Seyi went with “phony” while the Breakfast Club went with “phonetics”. In my opinion, the latter argument is more plausible but I’m also not ashamed to say I really don’t know.  Not Seyi. The singer answered the question with the conviction of someone with a doctorate degree in Pidgin Etymology.

https://youtu.be/7VfyXIgReEk

This is fast becoming a distraction, every TV and radio show must now be dying to book Seyi but for the wrong reasons. She has a single ft. Olamide “Pack and Go” but it can be argued that it’s her errors that people are paying greater attention. I do not think ALL publicity is good publicity, especially if that publicity questions your professional competence and endangers your professional relationships.

We keep getting told how Seyi Shay was managed by Beyonce’s father and how she’s performed in the this country and belonged to that girl group but if media training was part of her training package as an elite-level performer, then it’s time for Seyi Shay to show it.