There is a lot of shock over Wizkid – the biggest
African act in the last two years – missing out on
the BET Award for Best International Act – Africa.
And rightly so.
Wizkid’s late 2015 single, Ojuelegba was the hottest
single of last summer, even before Drake and Skepta
jumped on a remix that only served to catapult it
further. The song enjoyed endorsements from Alicia
Keys and Swizz Beatz, and got recognized by Fader as 12th Best Song of 2015 Globally.
To add to that, this year Wizkid co-wrote, co-produced and featured on the hottest song of this
summer, One Dance by Drake. The song has been the longest running number one single in the UK’s digital music history, as well as the longest running number one single this year on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016.
Needless to say, the reach of Wizkid’s music has comfortably reached beyond Africa to the US with all these features, and also to Europe where he recently
toured with Chris Brown. He has brought so much
attention to African music with American entertainment personalities like Wale and DJ Akademiks discussing and defending him on radio
and social media respectively.
However, there is almost no way Wizkid could have
won that award. Wizkid made it clear last year that he will never go for a BET Award where he will be
awarded backstage, away from the live audience as
the media network does to the recipients of its
African award. He tweeted this;
@wizkidayo
Lol So I'm hearing BET is
mad cos I didn't come for the
pre shows and interviews!
Lol.
8:20 PM - 29 Jun 2015
951 951 Retweets
221 221 likes
He boycotted the awards last year, and rightfully so.
He was not the only one either. Ghanaian international act, Fuse ODG also took the same
stance, telling BET they have to stop the disrespect of African artists.
It is quite evident that there was no way BET would
have awarded an artist who stood up to them that
way. He also boycotted this year’s awards and did not participate in any of the promotion prior to the event.
This in my opinion, is a stance that other African
artists have to start taking to preserve their self-
respect as well as that of the African people. It is disrespectful that an award created to honour and award black people of excellence will segregate Africans by not giving them their awards during the
main event.
