“Wizkid Live in Zambia” promoter Transblasts Entertainment, has issued a statement explaining what happened at the concert in Lusaka on 30th, April.
The venue of the event – National Heroes Stadium, Lusaka – has the capacity to seat 60,000 people and the event was scheduled to start by 6PM but Wizkid was only able to land Lusaka in the early hours of 1st, May. By that time, the crowd had thinned out to only a few thousand.
We didn’t of course fill up the stadium as we had envisaged and campaigned for and in that regard we are not proud at all. We didn’t start the show as early as we had envisaged.
Wizkid at Heroes Stadium, Lusaka (Instagram)
The promoter explained the circumstances surrounding Wizkid’s late arrival –
He (Wizkid) had a show in Sierra Leone on the 28th of April 2016 and needed to either return to Lagos on the morning of the 29th of April and proceed to Lusaka and arrive on the morning of the 30th of April 2016. To achieve that, we required availability of commercial flights between Freetown, Sierra Leone and Lagos.
We decided to charter a private JET from Lagos to Freetown and back, and proceed with a commercial flight from Lagos to JHB and again a private charter from JHB to Lusaka. Unfortunately and due to circumstances beyond our control, 3 of the WIZKID management including himself, missed the Lagos to JHB flight.
We never slept and were on phone trying with his management to hire an emergency private charter from Lagos to Lusaka. Eventually we found an alternative however, when he should have landed at 5AM on the 30th of April 2016, in JHB, the only available flight was landing late. As he landed the private charter was already positioned and ready to take off. He eventually landed in Zambia in the early morning of May 1 2016.
Wizkid at Heroes Stadium, Lusaka (Instagram)
Transblasts sighted a number of other issues that made the show unsuccessful, including ticket pricing claiming to have “miscalculated” in making the tickets prohibitively expensive. The cheapest ticket was pegged at 100 Zambian Kwacha, roughly N2,100 while the VIP tickets were available for 1,000 Zambian Kwacha, roughly N21,100.
There was a public outcry when we announced our pricing but then we looked at the amount of investment required to put up such a show and those prices were the most economical we could come up with if we were to sustain the hosting of the event.
However, the promoter has made compensatory arrangements for some ticket holders to attend another show featuring Wizkid on 1st, May.