Following the release of her track “Africa Money,” Ghanaian songstress Wendy Shay found herself at the center of a potential legal dispute as many bloggers began urging Barima Sidney to take legal action against her for sampling his song.
However, in a recent interview on Cape Coast-based Property FM, Sidney addressed why he chose not to pursue legal action against Wendy Shay for the alleged sampling of his song “Africa Money.”
“I’ve refrained from commenting on the issue of Wendy Shay sampling ‘Africa Money’ because I don’t perceive it as her sampling my song,” he stated. “Certain bloggers attempted to sow discord between us, but I don’t see any resemblance between her work and mine. After all, I’m not the originator of the terms ‘Africa’ or ‘money.'”
He elaborated, “If I’ve used the phrase ‘Africa money’ and she has also incorporated it into her work, it’s perfectly acceptable. Therefore, I didn’t see any cause for concern. However, it was the bloggers who insinuated that I was planning to take legal action against Wendy Shay. I haven’t made any such statement.”
Sidney emphasized that the words artistes usually employ in their songs are not of their creation and there’s a finite pool of vocabulary to draw from, adding that, “Whatever I express today may have been articulated by someone else before.”
He continued, “I didn’t perceive any wrongdoing, and I considered it a normal occurrence. My only grievance arose when bloggers began fabricating stories to pit me against Wendy Shay in order to elicit a response from her, for reasons unknown to me.”
“I will never assert that Wendy Shay sampled my song merely because she used the words ‘Africa’ and ‘money.’ I didn’t coin those terms, so if someone combines them to create something new, there’s no issue,” he concluded.
