Fame, Legacy, and the Delusion of Greatness Olaitan Adesina
Fame, Legacy, and the Delusion of Greatness
Olaitan Adesina
Since his mother’s passing, Ibrahim Ayodeji Balogun AKA Wizkid has been on a downward trajectory. While his undeniably immense talent may conceal the true state of his mental and emotional stability, his latest comment in the social media tiff with Seun Kuti is a dead giveaway.
There is a peculiar confidence that only fame without memory can produce. It is the confidence that makes a pop star, and a swarm of digitally excitable fans, wake up one morning and decide they have outgrown history itself. That is why we are being told, with straight-faced bravado, that Wizkid is bigger than Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Not more popular on streaming platforms. Not richer. Not more popular on Instagram. Bigger!
This is not audacity; it is deodorized illiteracy draped in Louis Vuitton.
Fela Anikulapo Kuti was not a musician who happened to be political. He was a political force who used music as a weapon. Afrobeat was not just a genre he rode to stardom. It was one he invented, structured, theorised, globalised, and weaponised against tyranny.
Entire music departments across the world study his work not because it is popular, but because it shifted consciousness. Wizkid sells millions of records. Fela changed the temperature of a continent.
Let us be clear about this – Fela confronted military dictatorships with nothing but horns, drums, sheer courage,and a caustic tongue. He was jailed more times than the number of hairs on Wizkid’s balls. His mother was murdered by the Nigerian state because he refused to bow. His home was burnt. His body was beaten. Yet, he kept recording albums that named names, mocked generals, and dared power to do its worst. When Fela sang, soldiers listened, sometimes before raiding his house. When Wizkid sings, brands listen, before renewing endorsement deals.
Wizkid’s greatest achievements are streams, awards, collaborations, and sold-out arenas. These are impressive in the way skyscrapers are impressive. Tall, shiny, and ultimately replaceable. Fela’s achievements are structural. He founded a musical language that birthed generations, from Lagos to London to Los Angeles. James Brown respected him. Stevie Wonder worked with him. Universities archive him. Protest movements quote him. Half a century later, African artistes, including Wizkid himself, still borrow his sound while struggling to inherit his courage.
Fela did not sing about vibes. He sang about imperialism, police brutality, cultural self-hatred, and postcolonial betrayal. He did not bow to the West; he confronted it. Wizkid’s global success exists because Fela forced the door open.
To say Wizkid is bigger than Fela is like saying Facebook is greater than the internet. One is infrastructure; the other is interface.
And then there is the fanbase who speak of “numbers” to dismiss a man whose life’s work was to prove that some things cannot be counted without losing their meaning. Fela does not need fans to scream on his behalf. History does that for him.
As for Seun Kuti, as much as I’m not surprised, I am ashamed on his behalf. Legacy is not only inherited, it must be guarded. Engaging glassy-eyed GenZ fans in an ego-soaked online skirmish was always going to end badly. You do not drag a sacred temple into a street fight and then act shocked when mud lands on it. Fela’s name does not need defending in comment sections, and his legacy gains nothing from this social media debacle. Silence, in this case, would have been the most eloquent reply.
Wizkid may be a star. Fela was a sun, burning, dangerous, impossible to look at directly, and essential to everything that grew after him. Long after streaming platforms are obsolete and today’s charts are forgotten, Fela will still be studied, argued over, feared, and revered.
Greatness that needs to announce itself is already confessing its limits.
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Olaitan Adesina is a poet and social critic. He writes from Akure.
