For long, Frank Gashumba has projected himself as the supportive father who is ready to go to any lengths to defend his celebrity daughter, Sheilah Gashumba, but a tell-all audio clip making rounds online suggests there is a lot more than meets the eye.
It turns out, beneath a bullish and braggart Frank, is a very disappointed and hurting man. Among the things irking him are the choices the daughter has made in her dating life.
The moving revelations pull the curtain on the façade that showbiz is. For example, in the eyes of many, singer Rickman Manrick (Sheilah’s boyfriend) owns a BMW.
“I bought her (Sheilah) that BMW. It wasn’t bought with a penny of hers…. Who dates a man that can’t afford to buy a car and instead wants to drive yours? None of the women I have ever dated ever gave me their car. Useless men of this generation,” Frank Gashumba is heard opening up in an audio clip to a one Diana.
He says he can never approve of a relationship between Sheilah and a man like Rickman who pierces his nose. He further chides the Enjoyment singer for not being man enough to buy his own car.
Frank is displeased that Sheilah has not been forthright with her income, and cites her failure to disclose the terms of her contract with NBS TV.
“We ought to be sitting down and strategizing on her investments. I’m not saying she shouldn’t live a little at her age, but she has no fallback position financially,” a sad Frank Gashumba goes on to say.
“I want her to be the most successful woman of her generation. But how will she achieve that when she is wasting all the money she earns? She needs to invest! By now, she would have started her own makeup line. She is lucky that she is famous, something she should be exploiting before it’s too late,” he said.
In the audio, Frank recounts the sacrifices he has had to make so Sheila can have a good future. Including paying up to $4,000 per term for her to attend international schools.
Publicly, Frank has always defended Sheilah, 26, whenever she has been faced with controversy. Recently, when Samson Kasumba called her out for downplaying local content creators, Frank attacked him during a radio program, daring the 49-year-old to produce his land titles and bank statements. Insinuating that Sheilah’s investments and savings outmatch Samson’s.
In 2020, when Sheilah’s comments – that she would rather sell samosas on the street than be paid Shs 50,000 on TV – prompted many to label her a slay queen, her father was quick to call her critics “fools” and “villagers”.
“In our youthful days, we had no Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Times have changed, but Ugandans are ignorant. All these people criticizing Sheilah envy her. They envy the life that Allah blessed her with. Why would you discuss someone if they didn’t have value? They are idiots!,” he said in a 2020 interview and went ahead to claim that Sheilah had added a $120,000 endorsement deal to her ‘long list’ of brands she endorsed at the time.
Yet, it now turns out he supports her actions only in public. Behind closed doors, he disapproves of a lot of what she does.
“Defend your son or your daughter in public. Blast her in private. Be hard on her. That’s what I do. Nobody rebukes you if they don’t love you,” he said in the latest audio.
When Sheilah turned 21, her dad penned her a note in which he celebrated her wins, including being the youngest person (at age 9) to be accredited to cover the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala and starting her own company (GashGram) at 17.
In the same note, Frank promised he would “continue to guide you, to protect you, to defend you the way a lioness defends its cub”. As a single parent, he added, “it has not been easy to raise you as an independent, God-fearing, and successful young woman”.
He also cautioned her to be wary that as she climbs up steep mountains, sometimes she will scar her knees and break her skin. And that she shouldn’t focus on the scars but rather on the journey.
Six years later, it seems it is instead Frank that Sheilah’s scars are haunting at night.
The latest tangle in the celebrity family is not isolated. There has been a pattern of conflict between the two, stoked by Sheilah’s behavior.
Back in 2018, there were media reports that Frank had thoroughly beaten Sheilah then 21, to a point of bruising her, after she returned home drunk and wasted in the company of her girlfriends.
He would later post… “You will realize I was right after you have given birth”.
The 2018 incident which largely ignited Sheilah’s departure from her father’s house to live independently, also dragged in her mom. It was reported she called her mom after her dad grounded her. At the time, Frank had made it clear in interviews and through posts that nobody was going to tell him how to run his house. And that there were rules that Sheilah had to abide by.
In one of the interviews, he described his ex-wife (Sheilah’s mom) as a third force and “wrong element” that was fighting hard to derail his daughter whom he has raised by himself since P1.
It seems at the center of the rift between the NBS TV host and her father is the mom. In the latest audio, Frank hints at it.
“Sheilah had started a business at Kisementi and she was making money. But her mom came into the business and ruined it all,” he says.
Growing up in the limelight – having become a TV host at age 9 – coupled with the celebrity status that social media has handed personalities of her stature, Sheilah has had unique obstacles to maneuver. Some would argue, her dad set her on a path that was bound to lead her to these very choices.
Her recent rebuttal to Kaiyz’s criticism about how she dresses indecently, Sheilah attributed her sense of fashion to the lifestyle she grew up in. She said she drew inspiration from the likes of Rihanna and Beyonce. And that as a kid, she watched E!
Perhaps it was this exposure that led her to tattoo her body, the other thing that has infuriated her dad.
“She has a tattoo on her bum. And you think I can be happy? Sheilah has a body that every woman would kill for. Women are bleaching their bodies every day to have light skin. But she chooses to fill hers with tattoos,” he said.
“She even has a tattoo of this goon (Sheila’s ex-boyfriend – God’s Plan) in her back. I have a lot of pain.”
In trying to conceal the tattoo after her separation with God’s Plan in 2020, Sheilah got a bigger tattoo – angel-like wings that also look like a love symbol.
