Written by Oluwatobi Oke
Awards are strange things to build a culture around. They cannot measure art the way a stopwatch measures a sprint, yet every year an institution stands up and insists on doing exactly that. For almost twenty years, that institution in Nigerian music has been the Headies. Long before Afrobeats filled arenas in London and sold out stadiums across continents, the Headies was already in the room, documenting, naming, and occasionally arguing about who deserved the flowers first.
That history earns it the right to be taken seriously. It also earns it the right to be criticised seriously, which is different from being dismissed. You criticise what you believe is worth saving.
Start with what it got right, because the receipts are genuine. The Next Rated award, since Asa won the very first one in 2006, has functioned as a national co-sign for emerging artists who had talent but no leverage yet. Davido drove off in a Hyundai Sonata before “Davido” meant what it means today. Sean Tizzle got a Hyundai Tucson. Mr Eazi got an SUV. By 2022 the prize had become a Bentley Bentayga. These were not just trophies. They were public declarations that someone in the room had bet on you before the streaming numbers caught up. Veterans like Wasiu Ayinde Marshall and Femi Kuti were inducted into the Hall of Fame, work was archived, careers were marked. For an entire generation, staying up past bedtime to watch the Headies was not unusual. It was expected.
So what happened?
The first real crack showed in 2013 when Burna Boy stormed off after Sean Tizzle won Next Rated, an early sign that the trust between artists and organisers was thinner than the glamour suggested. Then came January 1, 2016, the night most people point to as the real turning point. Reekado Banks, signed to Don Jazzy‘s Mavin Records, won Next Rated over Olamide‘s protégé Lil Kesh. When Olamide’s own artist Adekunle Gold won Best Alternative Song minutes later, Olamide grabbed the mic, declared the Next Rated award belonged to Lil Kesh, swore live on television, threw his cup, and walked off stage with his middle fingers raised. Don Jazzy, accepting his own Special Recognition award shortly after, fired back on stage: “Egbon Olamide, if you want the car, come and collect it.” Olamide spent the night tweeting insults at Don Jazzy. It took Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, hosting both of them at his Lagos home days later, to broker peace between two label bosses over an award show disagreement. That is not the behaviour of an institution fully in control of its own credibility, and it is not the behaviour of artists treating the platform with the respect they expect it to show them.
Tekno added his own chapter later that same year. Nominated for Next Rated despite already having hits to his name, he mocked the nomination on Instagram, “Next rated after how many years, let’s be honest please,” then refused to participate in the mandatory promotional activities tied to the category’s sponsor. He was disqualified. The artist who felt the award was beneath him chose public defiance over quiet withdrawal, and the institution chose to enforce its own rules rather than bend for a star.
Then came 2019, the year everything converged. Naira Marley watched Zlatan lose Next Rated to Rema and tweeted, “Legwork bigger than headies2019,” a line that landed because it captured exactly how disposable many artists had started to feel the award was. That same weekend, Wizkid sold out the O2 Arena in London with Starboy Fest, his first time filling the 20,000-capacity venue, on the same night as the Headies ceremony in Lagos. Tiwa Savage, Olamide, Reekado Banks, Maleek Berry, Fireboy DML, and Naira Marley himself were all in London instead of Lagos. The Headies, that night, was visibly short on the star power it depends on to feel relevant, while the bigger spectacle was happening four thousand miles away with most of the same names.
The ceremony left the country entirely after that, holding its 15th and 16th editions in Atlanta. It returned to Lagos in 2025 for the 17th edition, themed Back to Base, and the homecoming was meant to be symbolic, a chance to prove the institution could fix itself at home. It did not go cleanly. The ceremony ran so far behind schedule that organisers abruptly ended the night without ever announcing four major categories, including Best R&B Single and Best Collaboration. Several winners did not even receive physical plaques, reportedly due to a shortage. Shallipopi, who won Best Rap Single, was handed a handshake instead of a trophy on stage, visibly upset, and was reported afterward to have said he would never attend the Headies again. The homecoming meant to prove something instead became its own case study in what still needed fixing.
Ayra Starr‘s history with the institution captures the more recent texture of this tension. In 2023, she won Best Female Artiste at the ceremony held in Atlanta, but the category was never announced on stage. She rejected the award publicly, writing that she would never be grateful for winning something that was not even deemed worth announcing, and pointed to Tiwa Savage and Tems as artists who deserved better than that nonchalance. A year later, while she was in New York, Animashaun personally invited her to attend and receive an award, offering to book her a business class ticket. She insisted on a private jet or nothing. When the organisers presented her award online instead, she accused them of doing so because she was a woman.
Both moments are worth holding at once, because they cut in opposite directions. The Headies failing to announce a major female category onstage was a real institutional failure. Ayra Starr demanding a private jet for an award she already had reservations about was a real demonstration of exactly the kind of detachment Naira Marley’s tweet was pointing at. Neither side comes out of that exchange looking entirely fair.
Which brings the conversation to now. The 18th edition, marking the Headies’ 20th anniversary, will be held in Toronto. Speaking on Arise TV, Animashaun framed the decision around elevating the platform to genuine global scale while solving a sponsorship bottleneck that has limited what the ceremony can do domestically. He announced a dual-city structure, simultaneous programming in Toronto and Lagos, designed to keep the local audience engaged even with the main stage abroad, and addressed long-standing criticism around plaque quality and artist dissatisfaction.
The funding argument deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as excuse-making. Animashaun has pointed out that most major global award platforms run on four or five revenue streams while the Headies has leaned on essentially one, sponsorship, and compared the situation to the Grammys, which benefit from institutional backing strong enough that Los Angeles fought to bring the ceremony back after a temporary pandemic-era move to New York. His underlying question, what events are actually part of Nigeria’s own cultural DNA in the way the Grammys are part of LA’s, is fair and uncomfortable in equal measure.
But listening to him repeat that explanation across multiple interviews raises a different question: is this an institution genuinely adapting in response to feedback, or one that has settled on a single talking point and is rehearsing it. The reasoning sounds consistent. What is less clear is whether the actual experience on the ground, the production quality, the plaque issues, the onstage chaos that has embarrassed winners like Ayra Starr, is improving at a pace that matches how confidently the funding argument gets repeated. Saying the right things in an interview is not the same as the ceremony itself getting visibly better.
And the infrastructure argument has a real complication sitting inside Nigeria right now. The newly refurbished Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts, formerly the National Theatre, will host Dave’s debut Lagos headline shows in October, the closing dates of a world tour that has already sold out venues across Europe, North America, and South Africa. If a venue inside the country can anchor a cultural moment of that scale, the claim that Nigeria simply lacks adequate infrastructure becomes harder to accept without more nuance. The deeper gap may not be physical space at all. It may be the absence of state-level partnership, the kind that turns a cultural institution into protected civic identity rather than a line item that depends entirely on whichever sponsor shows up that particular year.
None of this means the Headies should be abandoned. There is no other African music award with this much documented history, this much symbolic weight, this much memory of who Nigerian music was becoming before the rest of the world noticed. Walking away from it would cost the culture far more than another flight to another city ever could. The argument has never been to tear the institution down. The argument is that twenty years in, both sides of this relationship, the organisers and the artists they exist to celebrate, owe each other more consistency than either has shown.
The Headies remains Africa’s biggest music award. Whether it remains Africa’s most trusted one is genuinely in question, and that question will not be settled by another plane ticket or another well-rehearsed interview answer. It will be settled by an institution willing to fix what keeps embarrassing its own winners, viewers and by an industry willing to show up for a platform with the same seriousness it expects that platform to show up for them.
Leave a Reply