On Miss UBa 2018 and the Pageant as Fundraising Mechanism
A critical examination of the Miss UBa 2018 'popularity contest,' which allowed direct vote-buying, prompting reflection on whether monetized participation could actually improve beauty pageants by forcing them toward transparent fundraising rather than hollow merit claims.
MISS UBa2018 SCAM?
If you are stuck on Poise then you know very much about my views on beauty pageants - basically, they shouldn’t exist as they are. Every time another pageant comes on my radar, it is an opportunity for me to revisit my views. In this case it is MissUBa 2018.
The heat surrounding the competition comes from the fact that you can openly buy votes. Many are on the side that, that is not a fair metric for such competitions. I mean, at face value it makes no sense but come to think of it, that is actually something I believe can begin solving my problem with pageants.
I do not know the intentions of the organizers of the MissUBa 2018 Popularity contest so I am not in any way endorsing their project. I just think they have made us talk about something important.
So as a parent with a child in university - why shouldn’t I beat the block out of the head of my child who is spending 500FCFA out of his pocket allowance just so that the world can know the most popular girl on the sorry looking University of Bamenda campus?
I want to point out the fact that from the most official looking piece of information I have gathered on the event, the event is said to be a ‘popularity contest’ not a ‘beauty contest.’ - let me leave that here for those who were thinking otherwise.
Any-Ha!
The issue here is - of what importance is popularity on a school campus? I am sure we all know many things that look, sound, and are better than being popular. The truth is the most popular people in that context are usually either from the Bad Fashion Community or Wash Turn Turn Cafiage - pun intended.
The question now is - how does ya bad fashion and wash ton ton help US? and if you ask why us? - I’ll remind you tagged us.
If the organizers are not just trying to pull a quick one on the masses, I applaud their idea. Fund raising abilities should be a high coefficient criteria in pageants. If the funds raised then get put to good use, pageants might just become something I like.
- Tino Foy
University pageants and beauty competitions were—and remain—ubiquitous fixtures of campus culture in Cameroon, often functioning as both social events and informal fundraising ventures. This piece intervenes in a specific moment when one institution made its commercial logic explicit rather than implicit, sparking public debate about the ethics and utility of such competitions.
The writer reframes what appeared to be a scandal (purchasable votes) as a potential clarification: if pageants stopped pretending to measure beauty or merit and instead openly functioned as fundraising drives with transparent participation costs, they might at least be honest about their purpose. The piece matters now as a reminder that critique need not be absolute rejection—that there is intellectual space between endorsement and dismissal, and that a flawed institution can sometimes reveal its own potential reform simply by being transparent about how it actually works.