Charterhouse’s ‘Stars of the Future’ runner-up, Ramzi is one of nine contestants chosen from Ghana to compete in ‘Idols West Africa’. Out of a total of 1223 people who auditioned for the competition, only 9 made a good enough impression on the judges to go through to the next phase -- an appearance at the main event at Planet One in Lagos.

Idols West Africa’s Accra auditions saw a mixed breed of musicians qualifying for the big event: a Liberian refugee, a Nigerian guy studying in KNUST, and a lady claiming to have Chinese, Jamaican and African blood and tracing her roots to the Ashanti tribe.

Those who showed up for the auditions were required in the first stage of the auditions to sing a pop song for 2 minutes. Sixty were short-listed out of the lot and recalled later to sing for no fixed amount of time. It was after the second round that the ‘privileged 9’ were selected. A good singing voice was not all that the judges were looking out for. The contestants were also marked for showbiz appearance.

The lucky 9 will join the Nigerian selection on February 1st in Calabar and go through regional and theatre auditions till February 26th. The actual event begins March 4th and will air on MNET.

M-NET is in discussions with Metro TV and if all goes well, the Accra-based network will re-broadcast each episode of the contest a few days after it had aired on M-NET.