Ghana’s self-acclaimed dancehall King-Shatta Wale has offered to sell all his 3 Ghana Music Awards plaques for 2 Ghana Cedis, far less than 1 dollar—and somehow, some Ghanaians regard this as disrespectful to the organisers of the annual Ghana Music award scheme as well as the industry in entirety.
The sale of an award plaque by an artiste by default has no contemptuous connotation—and all around the world, artistes sell/have sold awards they’ve won in various countries.
In fact, the sale of awards became so worrying and foretelling to big awarding bodies like the Academy Awards (Oscars) some years ago to the extent that, they now have some sort of ‘unfair’ contract with the award winners—stating that, whoever wants to sell his or her Oscar award must first offer it for sale to the Academy for the paltry sum of $1.
And this applies to all the post 1950 Oscar winners, making it illegal today to sell an Oscar plaque won after 1950 without first offering it to the Academy.
Perhaps, Shatta Wale’s antics throw a challenge to the organisers of the annual Ghana Music Awards to consider this, and tow the Academy lines—which will prevent the sale of their plaques, to cut off the seemingly taint such sales would bring.
In 2013, Screenwriter Charles MacArthur’s 1935 “Academy First Award”, won at the 8th Annual Academy Awards for Best Story for The Scoundrel, was sold for $106,231.
Even before that, Magician-David Copperfield bought Casablanca director-Michael Curtiz’s 1943 Oscar plaque for $232,000.00 in 2003 and later sold it in a Nate Sanders auction in 2012, for over $2 million.
So there is nothing inherently wrong with the sale of awards’ an artiste has received—unless there is a binding contract which prevents the person for putting the plaque up for sale or which stipulates that sales must be made a particular way.