Kenzo on why he’s cutting ties with media; set to start own podcast

All through his 15-year music career, the singer says he’s seen nothing but hate, malice and slander from the media, and for that, he’s decided to take a step back.

“I have reached a stage where I cannot do interviews anymore,” Kenzo said in an interview with TV host and YouTuber Ruth Kalibbala.

Kenzo claims journalists are being used by his enemies to throw him off course. A lot of journalists, he says, are paid to ask him questions that only make him look bad in the public.

“You find that there is a reporter who is in your face wherever you turn, they are following you everywhere; and whatever chance they get to ask you a question, it is always in the interest of other people who sent him,” he said.

“Even when you take him aside and ask why he is asking you such twisted questions, he will tell you he has been instructed to ask those specific questions.

“Now I have to avoid that person because he himself has no issue with you but it is his bosses in his ear.”

Eddy Kenzo pulse uganda

Kenzo, now President of the Uganda National Musician Federation (UNMF) is a self-made globally acclaimed artist, having come up from the streets with no parents.

But throughout his career, he says, he has never had a single media interview that he enjoyed.

Instead of asking him how he built his successful career and avoided the fate of most street children, he says, reporters only want to ask him about his ex-lover Rema, and the endless fights in the industry.

At least twice now, he says, he has been accused by journalists of murdering people he cared most about.

First, he says, he was questioned by a journalist if he had a hand in the death of Alex Ssempijja, one of the children in the Triplets dance group, who died in a bike accident in 2015.

Then in October last year, following the death of his elder brother, Mande Hassan Kiwalabye, he says a reporter questioned him on whether he was involved in the murder.

In order to avoid confrontations with reporters, Kenzo says he plans to stay away from them.

Instead, he says, he will start his own platform where he will engage directly with his fans.

“In a not-distant future, you will see me starting to do my own podcast so I can speak my own mind or interview other people and ask the real questions that matter,” he said.