03 Aug 2026

As the music industry gears up for the Botswana Music Union (BOMU) Awards billed for August 29, Han C makes way into the night with a nomination in two projects that technically belong to last year’s music calendar.

At first glance, the timing looks off. Bosa and Mamasita both came out in late 2024, while most of the field is drawn from 2025 releases. For an awards cycle that is supposed to celebrate a single year’s work, that could look like an inconsistency. It is not and the explanation comes down to the awards calendar itself.

The answer is written directly into BOMU’s own rulebook. Rule 7.12 of the official BOMU XIV Rules and Regulations sets the eligibility window for this edition as new albums released between January 1, 2024 and December 2025, a two-year span rather than a standard single-year cycle, and one that applies across categories, not just Album of the Year. This is what puts Bosa and Mamasita, both released in late 2024, squarely inside the rules.

The wider window also explains why this is not a one-off exception carved out for a single artist.  

“It is not only Han C, there are many other releases,” said BOMU Awards Coordinator Seabelo Modibe while addressing questions on the matter.

Harry Cane’s Gomba Gomba, a fellow Song of the Year nominee is among the other tracks from the closing months of 2024 that made the cut under the same clause.

Modibe said the reason for the longer window was that last year’s ceremony did not go ahead due to a government funding shortfall, leaving no nomination cycle to catch that stretch of 2024. 

Rather than letting that gap exclude a year’s worth of music, the rules extended the net, back to January 2024. A separate clause, rule 7.16, closes the obvious loophole this could create, any EP or recording that already entered the previous BOMU Awards (edition XII) is disqualified from re-entering, so the wider window pulls in previously-uncaptured material without letting anything be nominated twice.

Organisers pointed to elsewhere, submissions for this year’s awards jumped to nearly 2 000, up sharply from 483 in the previous cycle, a jump consistent with two years’ worth of eligible material landing in a single nomination round.

The longer runway has not just kept Han C in the conversation twice, it has arguably strengthened his hand going into the ceremony. ENDS