Boot camp or pampering in the academy?

“Brendah I miss you Oh!!!!” Is Steve from Kenya too bossy and loud?

On Day 2, the contestants pitched in to clean the house but this proved to be a difficult exercise as Steve complained that he hadn’t seen Gabiro doing any cleaning at all. He thereafter asked Gabiro to clean the verandah and the Rwandan did not look to happy to be doing such menial tasks. In the evening as the contestants cut up pictures, Steve’s loud nature clearly shone through when he loudly proclaimed, “I miss Brendah (Uganda) Oh!!!” with a Nigerian intonation.

Choreographer Edu arrived for the morning dance lesson and put the contestants through their paces, some of the students struggled with the steps. Most notably, Tom from Uganda danced and warmed very stiffly although he was on the frontline. Immediately after their dance session in the morning with Edu, the TPF housemates had to clean and tidy up the house and do the dishes. Steve of Kenya tried to marshal those that he was working with but this was proving to be difficult because Gilbert from Rwanda was not participating in the activities. Steve also commented to Gaelle that Gilbert did not seem to have done any work, and in fact asked Gilbert to go over the patio again with a rag.

Steve was at it again with K-Deng being his victim this time. He told Rachel, who was cleaning the boys’ room to put out all the boys’ shoes in the sun to air and K-Deng just had stinky shoes. He asked him not to put his dirty shoes back in the room until he cleaned them and let them air first in the sunshine. Once Rachel from Uganda was done cleaning the room he loudly proclaimed to Africa that Rachel is “…a wife.”

Once done with their cleaning activities, some of the housemates chilled out on the patio and Steve tried to teach K-Deng the contestant from Southern Sudan about the importance of pronunciation using tongue twisters. Gaelle of Rwanda was also present as they laughed at K-Deng and his seemingly poor pronunciation of words. K-Deng was offended and they got into a heated argument with Steve about rapping. He claims that the best rappers in the world are guided by numbers and not the pronunciation of words. Steve, however, pointed out that rapping was still about words and proper pronunciation helps the audience hear and understand the song.

During the Health and Safety session with Benjamin and Gilbert from EABL Health and Safety, most of the housemates looked quite tired and bored. Let’s hope they will be able to remember what they learnt in case of an emergency. Franklin from KK Security was on hand to give the contestants some tips on life during and after TPF4, he covered stalking by fans in Kenya and also in the contestants’ home countries.

Principal Hellen walked into the house and had to wait for the contestants to assemble before she could address them. She was not happy with the way they took their time getting to the lounge and had made the guests and teachers wait for them to assemble. She asked them to do their chores and preparations faster, to avoid being late and warned them if it happened again, they would all be punished. She then moved on and started a group song while asking them to pick pieces of paper from a basket. When they opened them up, they discovered that they were their voting numbers in case they should be up for probation in the weeks to come and needed to canvass east Africa for votes.

Before Voice coach Kavutha came in for the afternoon voice lesson, the students had a jam session with Davis of Uganda playing the guitar but Leah from Tanzania did not seem interested in the song the others were jamming to. The students also had a tough time remembering what they had learnt on the previous day’s lesson and could not correctly respond to her questions. During today’s lesson, she showed the contestants how to breathe correctly during their performance.

She asked contestants from each country to perform a folk song in the native tongue/ language. Uganda was up first and the said that the song meant, “Just dance” and went on to add, “whether you break those are your problems.” Overall the group performance went well and Rachel moved her waist in a style that was similar to former contestant Carol Nabulime. Perhaps this edition’s Dancing Queen will also be Uganda.

In evening as some of the contestants worked on their collage tasks that Principal Hellen had given them, there were some who practiced their songs for the Probation show. K-Deng practiced TID’s “Sura Yako” loudly as he looked at the lyrics in the music area while Steve and Paleki worked on their collage tasks. We hope that he will take Steve’s earlier direction on pronunciation into consideration throughout his rehearsals this week.

Generally, the contestants seemed exhausted as they went about their activities today. Will they be able to pick up the pace and wow us with their performance on Saturday?

Tune in to the daily weekday show from 8.30pm-9.00pm East African time and 10.00pm-10.30pm Central African time on CitizenTv (Kenya), UBC TV (Uganda),TBC TV (TZ),Rwanda TV(RW) and SSTV in Sudan.

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