Organisers of the Zimbabwe Music Awards are at loggerheads with Cutting Edge Productions, a South African company, which was supposed to work closely with the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation at the recently held awards cere- mony. CEP South Africa is demanding a whopping US$70 000 for their services which they have rendered to Zima, although the company did not come for the ceremony as scheduled.
In an interview with The Herald Entertainment, Zima chairman and founder Joseph Nyadzayo said it was not practical for them to pay CEP South Africa since they did not attend the event and refused to give them the trophies which were meant for the winners.
“We paid these people a total of US$54 850 and now they are asking for US$70 000 on top of that when they didn’t turn up for the event.
“They are saying they had lost a lot of work because of Zima so they need to be paid. We cannot pay such kind of money, especially when they did not attend the event and on top of that, they refused to give us the trophies, even a single one and we ended up using one old trophy on the event, resulting in artistes going home empty-handed,” he said.
Meanwhile, CEP South Africa managing director Michelle Fernandes insists that they had lost a lot of other work planning for the Zima therefore they need the outstanding arrears to be paid for them to release the trophies.
“We were asked to provide a key crew for the show and to provide with skills transfer to ZIMA and ZBC staff.
“The crew could not book the dates for other work as they booked off their time for the ZIMAs.
“Our negotiations with suppliers were based on the budget discussions we had with ZIMA.
“CEP advised ZIMA two weeks before the date that payment had to be made, otherwise the crew would charge cancellation fees.
“ZIMA did not want us to cancel as they were hopeful they would get the money.
“ZIMA only paid a portion of the technical fare and deposit for the statuettes.
“Unfortunately, the crew was not willing to travel to Zimbabwe without receiving enough payment,” she said.
Fernandes confirmed that they had received a total of US$54 850 from ZIMA.
“At the time of the nominee launch we had only received a total amount of US$14 850,00.
“This totalled to just about 10 percent of the overall budgeted amount. By the time we reached October 3, we had only received an additional US$40 000,00.
“We were promised to be paid the full outstanding balance but we are yet to receive the balance payment,” she said.
According to Fernandes, Zima is supposed to pay them US$30 000 for trophies and AV suppliers, US$20 000 for production balance and more money for the cancellation fees.-Herald