THE National Arts Council of Zimbabwe (NACZ) has launched the People’s Choice National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) voting platform on February 1 and it will run until the awards night on February 15 in Bulawayo. Entertainment Reporter
The People’s Choice Award is a special award given to an artist or arts organisation selected by members of the public. Members of the public are afforded the opportunity to make a choice of their own at NAMA.
“As the name suggests the People’s Choice Award is given to an individual/institution that would have received the most votes from members of the public,” said NACZ communications officer Catherine Mthombeni.
She said the public was at liberty to select an artist of their choice from the NAMA categories of music, literary arts, dance, visual arts, film and television, theatre and spoken word.
Voting is open to all Zimbabwe cellular networks with the shortcode 39436 and to vote, one has to type nama#name of artiste and send to 39436. The artiste with the most votes will be honoured in Bulawayo on February 15.
Meanwhile, Mthombeni said preparations for this year’s NAMA edition are at an advanced stage. The adjudication process is complete and NACZ will announce all the nominees today.
She said a total number of 664 NAMA entries were submitted for this year’s edition with entries from all provinces and those that had submitted included production houses, studios, stables, galleries, organisations, associations, groups, artistes, monitors and/or the public.
Mthombeni said in all the categories they were various entries, with the music category taking a lead with 256 entries and the spoken word category being the least with 18 entries.
