I’ll say that I’m not fussed one way or the other, though. In fact, I am unhappy with the whole MBGN contest idea. I always say of communities of people, “show me your reward system, and I’ll tell you the kind of community you are”.
So when a community pays so much attention to rewarding someone based on physical beauty, young people, especially – are going to get the message that spending lots of time on making yourself physically beautiful is their best bet.
I find it disappointing, because Nigeria really does not need more beautiful people right now. What the country needs are people who are intelligent; people who are creative; people who are entrepreneurs; people who show compassion towards others. At the end of the day though, I guess that the world is big enough for all kinds of contests to be held, and the MBGN organizers are doing their bit.
Still, I would not mind so much if I saw that there were contests held in Nigeria to reward the kind of people I have spoken of above. But I don’t hear that much of these kinds of contests; either they do not exist, or they do not have the same amount of money channelled towards them, and therefore the publicity is much more muted compared to the MBGN contest.
