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Pip: LSTVWW this week is asking who gets to decide — who sits on the jury, who hands out the trophy, and whether any of it actually means what it’s supposed to mean.
Mara: LSTV covers two distinct arenas where those decisions play out: the runway, where a Nigerian creative director just joined one of fashion’s key funding juries, and the music awards circuit, where Nigeria’s longest-running ceremony is having a very public reckoning with itself.
Pip: Let’s start with fashion and who’s actually in the room when the money gets allocated.
Berlin, the Jury, and Who’s in the Room
Mara: Berlin Contemporary, the funding initiative tied to Berlin Fashion Week SS27, convened an international jury this season — and Nigerian creative director, producer and cultural archivist Eniafe Momodu was among them, helping select 19 brands that each received a twenty-five-thousand-euro production grant.
Pip: That’s not a ceremonial seat. That’s a seat where the check gets written.
Mara: Exactly — and the selected cohort reflects that international scope: Orange Culture and Fruché from Nigeria, BUZIGAHILL from Uganda, John Lawrence Sullivan from Japan, and New York-based BARRAGÁN among them. Momodu’s appointment signals Berlin Contemporary’s broadening lens beyond traditional fashion capitals.
Pip: From runway allocations to a much older argument about who deserves the flowers — and whether the institution handing them out has earned the right to keep doing so.
Twenty Years of the Headies, Still Unresolved
Pip: The Headies turns twenty this year, and the piece examining its history opens with a question that cuts right to the bone: what does it mean to build a culture around an institution that keeps embarrassing the people it exists to celebrate?
Mara: The post sets the stakes plainly: “You criticise what you believe is worth saving.” That framing matters — this is not a dismissal of the Headies but a serious accounting of where trust has eroded and why.
Pip: And the erosion has receipts going back over a decade.
Mara: The Next Rated award began as genuine cultural infrastructure — Asa, Davido, Mr Eazi, each receiving a car before the streaming numbers caught up. By 2022 the prize had become a Bentley Bentayga. But the 2016 Olamide-Don Jazzy confrontation, which required Aliko Dangote to personally broker peace, exposed how thin the institution’s authority actually was under pressure.
Pip: It takes a special kind of credibility crisis when the continent’s richest man has to mediate a trophy dispute.
Mara: The pattern continued. Tekno was disqualified after mocking his own nomination. In 2019, Wizkid sold out the O2 Arena on the same night as the Lagos ceremony, and several major artists were simply in London instead. The 2025 homecoming edition ended without announcing four major categories, including Best R&B Single and Best Collaboration, and Shallipopi was handed a handshake where a plaque should have been.
Mara: Ayra Starr’s experience captures the more recent texture. She rejected a 2023 win after her category was never announced onstage, then later demanded a private jet to attend the following year’s ceremony. The post holds both moments without flinching: the Headies failing to announce a major female category was a real institutional failure; the private jet demand was a real demonstration of the detachment the institution had cultivated.
Pip: The 18th edition goes to Toronto, with a dual-city structure meant to solve a sponsorship bottleneck. The post takes the funding argument seriously — but asks whether the reasoning is genuine adaptation or a well-rehearsed talking point that isn’t yet matched by visible improvement on the ground.
Mara: And the infrastructure claim gets complicated by a detail sitting right inside Nigeria: the refurbished Wole Soyinka Centre will host Dave’s Lagos headline shows in October, closing a world tour that sold out venues across Europe, North America, and South Africa. If that venue can anchor a moment of that scale, the argument that Nigeria simply lacks adequate infrastructure needs more nuance.
Pip: The post lands here: twenty years in, both the organisers and the artists owe each other more consistency than either has shown.
Mara: Whether it’s a jury seat in Berlin or a plaque that never arrived in Lagos, both stories are really about institutional credibility — who holds it, how it’s built, and how quickly it can be lost.
Pip: More on what those institutions do next — we’ll be watching.
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