Ghanaian artiste, Belinda Nana Ekua Amoah, known in showbiz as Mzbel has disclosed that her first manager, Daniel Agyei who also happened to be her boyfriend allegedly abused her physically while they worked together.
Speaking to Frema Adunyame and Ato Kwamina on Citi TV’s Upside Down show on Sunday, she noted that the manager, Daniel was like a father to her.
“It was actually my first relationship,” she said.
When she was asked how old she was at the time, she replied, “I was not a teenager. I was old, but he was very old. He was like I think thirty-something years older than me, but he was nice, he was kind. He was the daddy I never had. He was my producer, my man, my best friend. He was there. He gave me stuff that I never got.”
But all that took a turn when her career blew up. Her manager and boyfriend started being more jealous, controlling and abusive, she recounted.
“He got jealous because now everybody wants a piece of Mzbel and he blocked a lot of my shows. When I get gigs from London, he wants to go with me and they say okay, this is a low budget show, you can’t come, but we’ll take care of her. He’d cancel the show. He wouldn’t let me go anywhere alone. He wants to check my phone calls, my messages.”
“And if I cannot tell him why this person is texting me this or that, he will beat the hell out of me. If I take off my wig right now and you check my forehead, I don’t have any hair there anymore. I used to braid my hair. When he’s beating me, he’d just grab my wig and throw me like this (all about),” she narrated.
She added that she could not report him to the police because he took her from her “very poor background” and gave “me the life that I never had.”
She used the opportunity to comment on the manager-artiste relationship, saying it is not healthy.
According to the ’16 Years’ hit-singer, music was never part of her plans, although she was the assistant Entertainment Prefect during her days at Abuakwa State College.
She said she wanted to be a media person which pushed her to the studio to learn on attachment and was pushed to try her skills till her first song was released.
Mzbel has songs such as ‘Awoso Me’, ‘Yopoo’, ’16 Years’, ‘Legelege’, among others.
Click below to watch the full interview:
