Countless hopefuls last Friday gathered at D’Podium event centre venue of the Lagos BBNaija audition to fight for a chance to partake in the reality TV show.
The mammoth crowd that attended the Lagos audition had gathered there as early as 6am . It was a day filled with accounts of fights, injuries and people at the verge of losing their lives.
Several videos trended online of people who fainted at the audition venue due to fatigue.
Ivan –Whyte Lawson, a budding entertainer who also attended the Lagos audition in this interview with TheNewsGuru gave his account of how he saved the life of a BBNaija hopeful, amongst other issues that transpired at the tumultuous audition .
Why did you decide to be part of BBNaija 2019 auditions?
I was convinced I could bring in a refreshing vibe to this year’s show.When more than half of my social media community kept urging that I get into the house and give them some unique flavour of realistic entertainment,I knew my aspiration to participate was not just for me–but for the ones that believed in me too. I attended the Lagos audition.
Can you share some of the weird experiences you had?
Mammoth crowd, participants defying death by climbing high fences to gain access into the venue by all odds, participants perching precariously on elevated platforms inches away from a live electric transformer and certain death–trying to skip the sea of desperate humans. A guy was lying on the side of the road in just underpants matted in wet sand,filth and an oddly angled right arm.
He was frothing from his mouth in near throes of death and breathing laboriously.
Audition contestants were standing around gisting and laughing–paying no heed to the dying guy lying right before them.
Some even crossed his body and flicked more sand on his face,and a couple just stood around video capturing his shame without trying to help.
What is the current health state of some of the casualties?
A guy was lying on the side of the road in just underpants matted in wet sand, filth and an oddly angled right arm.
He was frothing from his mouth in near throes of death and breathing laboriously. Audition contestants were standing around gisting and laughing–paying no heed to the dying guy lying right before them. Some even crossed his body and flicked more sand on his face,and a couple just stood around video capturing his shame without trying to help.
He had fallen from the high fence while trying to scale,dislocated his right arm and had a near fatal seizure.I rallied some kind hearted Nigerians to help us get an ambulance,because I know what death looked like and the eyes I saw there were already one step out of this world.
Only 2 girls worked with me and another well built guy and eventually we hefted the dude into an Uber cab (after about 2 declined–for fear of the man dying in their cabs),and I directed the cab to Lagoon hospital on Balogun bus stop,Awolowo way.
In the critical case unit,we met another Big Brother Naija stampede victim.
Her flesh had been ripped open from her thigh to her abdomen and you could literally see the whites of her bone.
Buying an admission card in Lagoon hospitals is about N30,000 and a simple stitch on wound operation is N28,000!
Apart from the guy whose life I saved, I saw a girl who had been slapped into a gutter by a speeding trailer while standing on the wrong side of the road waiting to worm her way through the milling bodies at the audition venue.She had a major crack on her skull. Another guy was carted in unconscious from asphyxiation.A girl had half her lower torso almost decapitated by a sharp stray steel sheet.Another lady had her rear end nearly jeopardized by some sharp jutting contraption she was thrown on during the fierce stampede.
Are you shocked that your account of the sad occurrences went viral?
Not quite.The disturbing events I personally witnessed were too alarming not to draw the attention of concerned Nigerians.
Do you think the real contestants of the reality TV show have been pre-selected
Everyone says so.And if we are to be honest,has anyone actually seen Uti Nwachukwu,Cee-Cee,Miracle or Ebuka Uchendu’s throwback pictures of them labouring beneath the sun alongside 7,000 other desperate youths fighting to be auditioned?I would love to see such pictures before I can firmly vouch for the transparency of this show’s selection process.
Final words
I do not feel like myself or 99% of the people that turned up for the auditions(Lagos specifically) were really given a standard and acceptable screening process.Throwing an audition like that for an undetermined amount of people and subjecting them to hazardous and unsavoury conditions–all to no end is violence.
It is ‘violence’ because it is manipulative, inconsiderate and an abject ridicule to the collective intelligence of Nigerian youths and their dreams.
This is the kind of ‘violence’ that begets belligerence in youths who once had aspirations–leading to a generation of anti-social, rebellious, narcissistic,truculent,lawless and sociopathic youths in the society who ultimately venture into crime.
The bitter experiences a cross-section of the youths experienced in the auditions; coupled with the popular opinion that the actual selected housemates would be called from their homes and automatically given tickets without a sweat–will never make them ever believe in essential concepts and values like ‘country’ ,’fairness’, ‘unity’, ‘patriotism’ and ‘Nigeria’. If the organizers of the show could reschedule and reconduct a proper unbiased screening process online, and invite ONLY the most successful and ELIGIBLE 20 from each of the 5 auditions zones in the country for a physical screening; then the BBN initiative would be applauded and respected more for its integrity. Asides that, Nigerians will always lack faith and only hold contempt for Big Brother Naija and all it stands for.