Veteran musician Akosua Agyepong has chided fellow artistes and industry players who backbite and incite others against colleagues who perform on political platforms, spreading negative information that gets the public to lose interest in their brand and content.

She said that the practice where any time an artiste is employed by politicians to perform for them and thereafter, their careers suffer for it because it is purported that they have an affiliation to those political parties is something that is usually fueled from within the industry itself.

An unhappy Akosua Agyepong, who said she suffered a similar thing after she performed for the late former president, Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, with her song, Esiwa, called for a stop to that practice.

“I want Ghanaians and industry people to understand something that when a president or a politician invites someone to come perform for them, they should not gossip among themselves that the person is from this party or from that party so they boycott the person’s songs.

“After Rex and I performed for President Rawlings, it was rumoured that I was an NDC person and so people boycotted my new song, Esiwa. People did not buy the song because it was rumoured that I was an NDC member meanwhile when someone like President Kufuor calls me to come perform, I go. It is just our business and people should stop destroying it with their envy,” she lamented.

Akosua Agyepong was speaking to GhanaWeb TV on her experiences with the late former president, Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, whom she became close to in the last few years.

Rawlings died at the age of 73 at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital from where he was on admission for a short illness, on November 12, 2020. He was buried in Accra at the new Military Cemetary on January 27, 2021.