Actors, Broadcasters To Honour Olusola With Football Match

Nigeria’s A-list actors and broadcasters are set to play a novelty football match tagged Battle of Great Voices  Awards 2012: Great Voices and Faces, to celebrate the late Ambassador Olusegun Olusola.

The football match is part of the activities lined up for the third edition of the Nigerian Broadcasters Awards (NBA), which the late Olusola was the grand patron.

To honour the highly respected culture aficionado, broadcaster, patron of the arts and diplomat, who died on Thursday, 21 June, Kazeem Popoola-led Reality Entertainment, organisers of the NBA, have planned to hold a seminar and a football match.

The two-day event, which will also double as a warm-up to this year’s edition of the NBA scheduled for November 2012, will hold at Yaba College of Technology, Yaba, Lagos, on 16 and 18 August.

The programmes are organised in conjunction with the Association of Mass Communication Students (AMACOS), YabaTech. The seminar with the theme:

Broadcasting In Nigeria, Past, Present And Future Problems and Prospects,  will see veterans in the electronic and print media, as well as few selected popular on-air personalities, delivering papers on the subject, while on Saturday, 18 August, it would  be a battle of the titans as famous TV/ Radio presenters will lock horns with movie stars in the  football match.

Popoola said: “Although, the two-day event was actually initiated to get the on-air personalities in the mood for the yearly award ceremony, it’s so sad that we lost Ambassador Olusola, our grand patron, at this time. “So, we’ve decided to dedicate the pre-events to the man who was a great influence to broadcasters and movie practitioners in the country. Moreover, we intend to immortalise Ambassador Olusola with a couple of awards in his name, and if possible a scholarship for best student in Theatre Arts and Mass Communications.

“We are using this medium to appeal to all corporate bodies to join us in keeping this vision alive. Baba was  very passionate about the NBA; he once told me that the idea (NBA) must not die.”

Ambassador Olusola, who earned many chieftaincy titles, worked as an actor, playwright, and was a founding member of “Players of the Dawn,” an amateur outfit that dominated the theatre scene in the 1950s.

He had a reputation as one of Africa’s leading art connoisseurs and his resume as a brilliant broadcaster began in 1959 when he became one of the African pioneering television broadcasters with the debut of television transmission in Nigeria at the WNTV, Ibadan.