Lourine Winniefred Adyero
Miss Uganda Foundation is in the spotlight for alleged financial exploitation and scheming of contestants.
Ms Lourine Winniefred Adyero who is the current Miss Uganda North, but was recently eliminated from the Miss Uganda (general) contention, has come out to accuse the organisers of the pageant for extorting money from contestants in the disguise of boosting their publicity to attract more votes.
According to Adyero, there are some two contestants who are already leading the race and these are said to have paid Shs60 million each to attract the voters. She explained that she was eliminated from the race because she could not afford to raise the money to buy the votes even after being encouraged by the organizers.
The dissatisfied contestant revealed that for every six votes, a person is required to pay Shs20,000.
“They told us it is a must for everyone to buy votes. So we were up for elimination because they were not seeing money coming through our links,” lamented Ms Adyero via a TikTok video.
She mentioned that her initial strong admiration for the beauty pageant has now turned to a waste after noticing that some values like integrity are not what the foundation is standing for.
“I thought they were up to integrity. I didn’t know they were professional scammers,” she said.
“When they saw that we were not giving them money, they put up my name and that of some other girl from Karamoja and told us that we are eliminated, of course, because we were not buying the votes,” she added.
Lourine also cited several other issues she referred to as injustices, among them being favouritism. She further alleged that contestants in the camp are taught things like how to grab rich men instead of teaching girls important aspects of life like how to empower themselves and to be independent.
The Miss Uganda Foundation has not yet come out to respond to the allegations made by one of their former contestants. The Foundation has in the past faced similar allegations.
The grand finale of this year’s Miss Uganda Pageant is scheduled to happen on Friday August 2, at Sheraton Kampala Hotel.
