Comedian Daniel Omara recounts the time he quit the 2011 hit TV series The Hostel saying it was the most depressing time of his life. He revealed that he took the decision to leave the show due to exploitation, revealing that each member of the cast was getting paid Shs 50,000 per episode.
Omara left the show in 2013 after three years on what till this day ranks as the most popular Ugandan TV series having aired on NTV Uganda, DStv channels, Zuku TV and NTV Kenya. The production also reached foreign audiences through international media like Ben TV (for the European continent audience), Canal France International and its African partners – eTV, Star Times and Rwanda TV.
“The media was on my case, acting like I was the one who destroyed the production by leaving. I left for my own reasons and one of them was payment,” Omara said in a discussion hosted on X by Mancave, an initiative aimed at tackling social norms that hinder men’s achievement of quality health, equity and social economic outcomes.
“And this is part of the story people have never heard. We were being paid Shs 50k per episode but everyone was there for a different reason,” he added.
“Gashumba (Sheilah) wasn’t kidding when she said these things. That’s why I laughed when people were like… ‘Ahh this chic is lying’. I’m like… ‘You guys have no idea’. Gashumba wasn’t playing when she brought that up. We were paid Shs 50k per episode.”
Referencing a 2020 shocking revelation made by TV and radio host, Sheilah Gashumba, who said that some TV stations pay their hosts a measly Shs 50,000 per show. Many quickly assumed this was a veiled jab at her former employers – NTV Uganda – one of the two broadcasting giants in Uganda.
Omara says members of The Hostel cast who attempted to renegotiate terms of employment were fired from the project. And this, he adds, explains why there were several changes in the actors every so often.
“Anyone who challenged the system was bounced from the project.”
The Hostel which premiered on NTV Uganda in February 2011 depicts the experiences of university students residing in a hostel. Its relatable story, twisting plots, variety of themes and a well-blended cast that had national representation quickly made the show very popular.
Though most of the cast were famous faces, it was Jasper Odoch (played by Omara), a cynical law student, that majority of the audience got drawn to. The other actors included Isaac Kuddzu, Richard Tuwangye, Michael Wawuyo Jr., Housen Mushema, Mathew Nabwiso, Dickson Zzizinga, Michael Wwwuyo, Akite Agnes and Eleanor Nabwiso among others.
For majority of the initial cast, the show which was rated by Synovate Research as the number 1 TV programme in Uganda in 2011 and 2012, became a springboard that landed them subsequent acting roles. Today, they are the big names in film.
The show was produced by Fast Track Productions, a production house which was owned by former Monitor Publications Managing Director, Conrad Nkutu.
For Omara, auditioning for the TV role was a way to position his brand to a wider audience.
This was four years after he auditioned for M-net’s talent search for Uganda’s funniest standup comedian. He and Pablo Kimuli, Patrick Salvado, Alex Muhangi, Prince Emma, Emmanuel Sebakigye and Herbert Segujja had emerged as finalists. In the years that followed, this crop had formed an outfit that was pioneering standup comedy as a form of entertainment in Kampala.
But the initial years of standup comedy earned little if not nothing for Omara and his peers, and the paltry payment he got from The Hostel pushed him into an economic quagmire.
He recounts that in spite of the fact that he was working, all the furniture in the house that he co-rented belonged to his housemate who was a banker. This (idea that he wasn’t making the same strides as his colleague) bothered him.
Though he had won $2,000 (Shs 4.1m at the time) from the M-net contest, he had spent all this on his tuition at university.
“It took me realizing that one gig (comedy) wasn’t enough. The comedy would set you up to be hired but at the same time I needed a retainer. Something that would pay me regularly. When The Hostel came up, I joined.”
“After I left the show, there was a smear campaign against the actors. Many will say I am making false allegations, but I know what I’m saying. I witnessed it firsthand. I did a bunch of interviews telling my side of the story and how we were paid Shs 50k, but none of this information was published. All tabloids were siding with the production house.”
He said there was nothing he could do to prove his innocence.
“I would see headlines in Kampala Sun that said ‘Odoch steals Hostel money’. You would be out there walking and people tell you ‘So you actors have now become thieves?’ That’s when it hit me that people actually believe the stories they read.”
Yet, he says, he had no access to the finances of the production house.
He also recalls headlines that reported how drugs and alcohol ruined his career.
“This was the beginning of my low moment.”
Unfortunately for Omara and the rest of the cast, there were no contracts signed between them and Fast Track Productions, according to a previous interview Omara did.
A meeting was held in Season 2 of the show and central to the concerns raised by the cast was the meagre payment. They demanded a pay rise.
“They (producers) said they would address it in Season 3. But twenty-something episodes into Season 3, there was no talk of a contract, no talk of a pay rise. We hadn’t even signed contracts. We were doing this out of passion,” said Omara in a 2016 interview with Crystal Newman.
Omara confronted the show producers and gave them a two-week ultimatum to draft a contract for him, failure of which he would quit.
“They told me to resume work and then we can talk. But I insisted we talk before I resume. The conclusion was ‘If you’re rebelling, then see ya’. I’m like ‘Cool’,” the comedian added in the interview.
A Daily Monitor article that quoted Fast Track Productions executives billed the budget for The Hostel’s 90-episode Season at Shs 900m, which implies that the budget for each Episode was Shs 10m. On top of sponsorships they had secured from key corporate brands.
“I would have loved to see that show thrive. I was too deep into the character. It took me two years to snap out.”
The myriad of negative stories would also target his relationship with his girlfriend. Clients leveraged the negative press he was getting, to underpay him for emceeing gigs. He was getting offered Shs 150k for the same gigs he had done for half a million shillings four years back.
Faced with this ruthless media campaign which was a way of his former employers at The Hostel to get back at him for standing up to them for the unfavorable work conditions, Omara withdrew from society. He locked himself in his house and was no longer taking calls. All he did was gaming on his Play Station 2.
“I would get up, write proposals and pitch ideas. I wrote so many proposals. Nothing went through.”
The exit from The Hostel had also set him on a path of drug abuse since he had chosen to isolate himself from the rest of the world. In 2013, he had started smoking weed so regularly and it nearly cost him his comedy career.
Looking back, he regrets sidelining the people who cared for him – including his family – and would have gotten him out of the dilemma he was facing.
“I opened up to my parents after about 6 months and they couldn’t believe I had been going through this.”
He had tried getting someone to manage his brand but this too had failed to work. They “screwed me over” and started doing double bookings, things that went against his principles and ruined his reputation.
As luck would have it, he ran into Robert Kabushega (who headed the government-owned media conglomerate – Vision Group) one day and the media executive made him an offer to be a TV host.
Omara’s TV stint began with him hosting Urban@Dawn (morning show) and later Business Unusual (a news parody show) on Urban TV.
He describes 2013 as “the worst year of my life”. The same year he broke up with his girlfriend and was at a moment in his life where he had given up on his comedy career.
“My recovery was through work. You need to give yourself purpose. Getting out of my house helped me recover. The reason I was smoking so much was because I had locked myself in the house for long. I had isolated myself with people with the same problem and this didn’t help the situation.”
“Work distracted me enough that after a while, I quit smoking. I had to be at work sobber. I had told myself I would never use intoxicants for my performances.”
Subconsciously, he went three weeks without smoking. But this was largely to do with the hectic work that went into producing his TV shows. By the time he got back home (the only space he was safe to smoke in), he was already so tired so he slept off.
But a senior executive at the now defunct Fast Track Productions that Plugged spoke to refuted the allegation that the production house engineered a smear campaign against Omara. The executive who preferred to speak anonymously considering they are no longer involved in the media production industry in fact described Omara as a key part of the success that The Hostel enjoyed.
“Omara is an excellent actor. I don’t know how much success we could have had without him. He was one of the best if not the best. He fitted his character profile properly. He was always professional and the audience loved him. If you spoke to our colleagues in management, I would say we loved him. He was a likeable person onset and offset. Were surprised at how difficult he became over the question of pay,” the senior executive told Plugged on Monday.
The executive who was key in the administrative and other decision-making processes at Fast Track Productions also does not deny the fact that there was a disagreement between Omara and the production house about the payment.
However, they say this payment was commensurate at the time, if other factors – the company footed transport costs and meals – are considered.
“Yes, we were paying Shs 50,000 per actor per episode. And that was 13 years ago. There has been so much inflation. I think Shs 50,000 of that time comes to about Shs 100,000 per day today. And we were providing transport. We collected these guys from their homes in the morning and dropped them in the evening. We were providing breakfast and lunch to them. So that money (Shs 50k) was net of tax,” the source told Plugged on Monday.
“Most of the actors were university students. I don’t know how many university students can earn Shs 100k per day. We renumerated them well. We gave him an opportunity to blossom as an actor. This was the first time he was acting. And we gave him an income for a couple of years. But most importantly, we were also struggling on the commercial side.”
Whereas the show enjoyed high audience ratings, the broadcasters and advertisers were not willing to buy the product at a proportionate price. As such, the source said, the producers could not afford to increase the payment of actors. Otherwise, the project would have folded.
It was these same hurdles – the economic dilemma and Uganda’s market dynamics that were unfavorable to content creators – that later forced the owners to sell the production house.
According to our source at Fast Track, all the other employees were grateful for those wages.
“The only complainant was Daniel. He wanted to be paid triple what everyone else was earning. He wanted to be paid Shs 150k per episode. That would have created two problems for us. One, we couldn’t afford it. Two, there was a fairness principle.”
A pay rise for Omara would have translated into a pay rise for the rest of the cast since he wasn’t the only high-value actor. Fast Track was running a team of 50 people including cast and crew. Tripling their wages, let alone doubling it was not economically viable, according to the source.
Adding that this challenge was explained to the team. The senior exec recounts the management borrowing the analogy of the Mexican standoff (a confrontation where no strategy exists that allows any party to achieve victory) to have the team understand that flexing over the pay would result in a bad ending for all parties involved.
Our source also contests the allegation that actors had no contracts.
“I drafted the contract template myself. It was a contract-driven environment because also our clients required us to have contracts with them. My interpretation of what he was trying to communicate is that he wanted a new contract with his wages tripled. If Daniel was standing in front of me, he cannot say he had no contract.”
Regarding the smear campaign and the tabloid stories, the source said; “The allegation isn’t true because our memory is very positive.”
“If he says he was defamed, that’s maybe because he himself created social media pressure on Facebook. I don’t remember all the history right now, but I suspect that one of our colleagues may have had to go (online) and explain it.”
“Nobody accused him of stealing. And nobody accused him of alcohol or drug abuse. I’m hearing of these smear allegations for the first time.”
Omara has since evolved significantly as a filmmaker, playing different roles both in films and TV shows. He has also grown from being just an actor, to becoming a screenwriter and director. Some of the projects he has been part of include A Kalabanda Ate My Homework (voice actor), Mela TV series (main actor), Plan B (actor), Beneath the Lies (actor), Prestige (actor), Kabi & Kalo (actor) Girl from Mparo (writer), KanSeeMe (director).
He also voiced one of the characters (Isingoma) in Disney’s recently released TV series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, an action-packed animated sci-fi anthology that tells ten futuristic stories reimagining what Africa’s future would look like, drawing inspiration from diverse cultures.
Uganda’s Raymond Malinga who directed Herderboy (an animation story of an elite trio of cattle herders who protect precious cyborg cattle from deadly spirits on the wild frontier of the Chwezi Kingdom in the highlands of future Uganda) enlisted Omara, Patrick Idring (Salvado) and Florence Kasumba (Black Panther) to voice the characters in the Disney project.
A decade since his departure from The Hostel, the fortunes of filmmaking in Uganda have slightly improved. Today, a number of producers are able to sustain taxing projects that require daily shooting. And actors are beginning to earn meaningful payment from filmmaking.
“When I joined 15 years ago, the most I would do as an actor was act in one movie or two. If you are too lucky, you would act in like 3 of them a year, and the most you would make was Shs 150,000 or Shs 100,000, so you would make like Shs 450,000 a year. Today, the story has changed; people actually act for a living,” acclaimed actor, director and producer, Mathew Nabwiso, has previously told Pulse Uganda in an interview.
“Today, you will find that there are so many commissioned projects, like the current show I am doing, Sanyu. People are on payroll, and they expect a salary at the end of the month. Today, for the first time, filmmakers can walk into a bank and apply for a loan. People can now buy cars, build houses, and start businesses with money from acting. So, for me, that is growth.”
Sources, some of whom have created commissioned content for MultiChoice, the biggest buyer of Ugandan productions, have disclosed that the Pay-tv giant spends about Shs 1 billion on a 100-episode Season. Comparing this to an almost similar budget that The Hostel operated on a decade ago, some analysts would say not much has changed in terms of the commercial value of content.
