Of Chris Brown, Smoking Weed And Getting Paid A Million Dollars

R&B star Chris Brown’s troubles seem to know no end since he got in the news for molesting his ex-girlfriend Rihanna. He is in the news again for yelling at a valet and refusing to pay a $10 charge at the PINZ Bowling Center in Los Angeles, CA.

Brown is reported to have refused the payment on the grounds that he did not stay at the bowling alley long enough to be charged $10.

But that does not seem to be his biggest problem at the moment. A Minister of State and Member of Parliament in Ghana, Rashid Pelpuo has called for his arrest for abusing controlled substances in public and inciting the public to civil disobedience.

Chris Brown was the main act for a mammoth show organized by Charterhouse, Ghana’s leading event organizer for rLG Communications to launch the IT company’s Home Office People Environment (HOPE) City project.

The American entertainer hit the stage and performed to the admiration of a huge audience who had come to the Accra Sports stadium to see him. He combined dazzling dance moves, light and visual effects as well as several costume changes to make his show outstanding. He particularly enthralled Ghanaians when he brought on Nigerian singer/rapper Wizkid to do the Ghanaian ‘azonto’ dance with him.

The controversy then started when Chris Brown is purported to have -at a point in his performance promoted the use of marijuana and actually gone ahead to smoke a joint to the amazement of the cheering crowd. "…if anybody's tripping on you smoking weed, f**k them", he is alleged to have said.

The embattled R&B singer is also getting a lot of criticism for the excessive use of vulgar language (particularly the F word) in the course of the show.

A post performance assessment however suggests that the singer may be getting flack for more than these stated reasons. A number of people have also berated rLG for dishing out $1 million to him as payment while Ghanaian artists played almost no part in the event. A peeved Hiplife artist, speaking on condition of anonymity whined “That’s what they do all the time; they bring all these yawa artists and pay them gargantuan amounts, and they don’t even know we exist at such times. And when we are lucky enough for them to approach us sometimes, they will not pay you even a decimal of that amount... Even azonto, someone has to come from Naija to dance it?”

Speaking in an interview with Sahara Reporters however, George Quaye, one of the event organizers refuted the claim. Even though he refused to disclose exactly how much was paid, he emphasized that the figure was less than a million dollars. “We did not pay him a million dollars, I can put that on record” he stated. “It is not our policy to disclose how much we pay our clients without their express permission, but I can tell you for a fact that it was not a million dollars”.

On the issue of smoking weed on stage, Mr. Quaye said “it was just part of his stage act. People interpreted it variously but it was just a part of an overall performance and a lot of people also did not see it as a big deal at all”.

Some social critics have suggested that the whole mêlée is just calculated towards the industrious Mr. Roland Agambire, CEO of rLG who is seen as ‘close to the presidency’. The Hope City project was launched by President John Mahama.