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Koffi Olomide, please keep your women in check
Koffi Olomide on stage with some of his dancers
It is in a unipot under the cool shade of a tree in a police barracks that I first listened to the enchanting sounds of tcha tcho, a type of music done by Koffi Olomide, a popular musician out of DR Congo.
Back then I had just completed high school and my ‘music mentor’ was a youthful police officer, who liked to unwind after work to a beer and the pulsating Papa Plus, a wildly popular album at the time.
I loved Koffi’s music and have kept tabs on him since. I have several copies of his albums, including that collabo with Papa Wemba, which I play often to put me in a good mood. But the love turned sour when the chanteur landed in Kenya recently.
He was caught on film walking back towards one of his dancers and kicking her somewhere in the mid-section. Then sh*t hit the fan: He was deported from Kenya, his concert in Zambia was cancelled, and he was arrested and sentenced in DR Congo.
What led to this? The story is that the dancer at the receiving end of his foot was involved in “fight” with his wife Cindy. Now, that is where Koffi made a mistake. Other men should take what happened to him as a lesson. Here are a few tips on how to handle your business to avoid being caught up in such situations.
Never beat a woman in public: Every man should always know that if you ever lifted as much as a finger towards a woman in public, the court of public opinion will charge and hang you without listening to your side of the story. However much the violence may be justified, say if the woman had a knife, you will not get off the hook.
Save yourself the trouble that will follow you like a bad smell by fleeing from the scene. Even at the risk of being laughed at, embarrassed or labelled a wimp. If I may play the devil’s advocate, I advise if you must be physical, do it in private. If asked about the bruises, she will say she slipped and fell.
Play your position: The other dimension to the Koffi-queen dancer debacle at the airport is that these two women, and probably others in the band, are involved with the superstar in some way. Reports indicate that Cindy, is his wife and a CEO-of-sorts in the band hierarchy.
So why would a dancer slap her boss? Unless she in some way feels “equal” to her! I believe the dancer is a side-chick or jump-off to Cindy’s husband.
Another mistake he made. When you are involved with more than one woman, make sure they know their position. Don’t keep grey areas, put everything in black and white. If she is a girlfriend, mistress, side-chick or “just a friend”, let them know their position in the pecking order. If they are wives, let them know their status as well.
Keep them all in check: Now that the position thing is sorted and the boundaries set, the duty of keeping the peace falls on the man who brings all these moving parts together.
It takes the skills of being both a diplomat and a dictator, there is no democracy in these things. Know how to balance rewards and punishments—the carrots and sticks.
Otherwise, you will get into situations that spill out of control like how it happened with Olomide at the airport. He should have pulled his Cindy from the mix, gone with her to the hotel…then docked the dancer’s pay for indiscipline but bought her dress (of course, secretly).
What happened
Congolese music star Koffi Olomide will spend the next three months in jail as he awaits a ruling on prosecutors’ request to imprison him for a longer period for assaulting one of his female dancers in Nairobi.
The singer’s free fall started when he kicked a woman in his band at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport last Friday.
