Can we please take a moment and appreciate the people whose names never appeared on the poster?
Not the singer. Not the influencers recording slow-motion entrance videos. And certainly not the celebrities who arrived fashionably late because apparently punctuality is for ordinary Ugandans.
I am talking about whoever was behind organising Vinka’s concert at Lugogo Cricket Oval.
The people with walkie-talkies, spreadsheets, group chats and enough patience to coordinate thousands of Ugandans in one place without Kampala turning into its usual reality show.
No stage collapse. No main act showing up when people had already memorised the DJ’s entire playlist. No chairs flying through the air over relationship misunderstandings. And, if the organisers are to be believed, barely any reports of phone theft.
In our concert history, that is almost suspiciously peaceful.
Ugandan concerts have somehow convinced us that a little chaos is part of the ticket price.
We buy a ticket knowing we might also lose a phone, spend three hours trying to escape the parking lot, inhale enough dust to qualify for a chest X-ray, and still get home at 3am wondering why the headline act performed for only 40 minutes.
We have normalised suffering so much that when an event actually works, it feels like someone forgot to add the usual Ugandan seasoning.
Yet Vinka’s concert reminded us that organising a concert is much bigger than booking an artiste and hiring loudspeakers.
It is essentially building a temporary city for eight hours.
There are entrances and exits to manage, bars and food stalls to coordinate, VIP sections to secure, lighting and sound to monitor, cameras to position, toilets to maintain, security to deploy and thousands of people to manage—many of whom arrive convinced that, regardless of what their ticket says, they deserve front-row treatment.
The funny thing is that the best organisers are almost invisible.
While we were busy screaming lyrics, taking selfies and posting TikToks before the songs had even ended, another performance was happening backstage.
Stage managers were calling cues. Sound engineers were making sure microphones behaved themselves. Wardrobe teams were handling quick outfit changes. Security teams were watching the crowd instead of waiting for chaos to introduce itself. Medical teams were reportedly on standby throughout the night in case anyone needed assistance.
That is how good event production works.
You are not supposed to notice it.
The moment the audience starts noticing the logistics, something has usually gone terribly wrong.
And perhaps that is the problem with how we measure success in Uganda’s entertainment industry. We spend so much time talking about the artiste, the crowd, the performances, the outfits and the celebrity sightings that we rarely talk about the people who make sure all those things happen in the first place.
We need more people who treat organisation as seriously as the entertainment itself.
People who understand that starting on time is not a miracle. Crowd control is not optional. Security is not something you remember after the first fight breaks out. And respecting people who paid for tickets is not some luxury customer-service package.
Kampala has accepted disorder for far too long, almost wearing it like a badge of honour.
We joke about traffic after concerts, stolen phones, delayed performances and endless waiting because we have come to expect them.
Maybe it is time we raised the bar.
A concert should not be considered successful simply because thousands of people attended. It should also be judged by how those people were treated, how safely they entered and left, whether the programme generally worked, and whether the experience justified what they paid for.
If concerts where people simply have a good time, enjoy the music and safely return home become the norm rather than the exception, that might be one of the biggest flexes Uganda’s entertainment industry has pulled off in years.
And honestly, whoever was behind Vinka’s concert deserves their flowers.
They quietly reminded us that professionalism does not have to compete with entertainment.
Sometimes, professionalism is the entertainment industry’s biggest flex—and yes, it can sell out a show.
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