By Danny Nsa
Nobody retires in Afrobeats quietly. You do not just wake up one morning, drop a tweet, and say, “I am done.” In this industry, retirement is either a slow public unraveling or a silence so loud it becomes its own announcement. And with these three, Davido, Wizkid, and Burna Boy, the question is not really if. It is who blinks first.
Let us be honest about what we are actually discussing here. Three of the most decorated artists Africa has ever produced, all competing for the same oxygen in the same room, all carrying the kind of ego it takes to fill stadiums, and all slowly, in very different ways, showing signs of wear. Watching them from the outside is like watching three heavyweight boxers who have been fighting since they were teenagers. The belts are still on the wall, but the knees do not lie.
Wizkid is the one who has been whispering about rest the longest. He said it during the Made in Lagos era. He said it after Essence went global. He comes online, drops something vague about stepping back, the internet panics, and then six months later he is back performing at the O2. The man has retired and unretired in our heads so many times that his actual retirement, when it comes, will feel like that famous story of the boy who cried wolf, except this time we will not believe it until his microphone has literally turned to dust. Wizkid is so allergic to consistency that his retirement will probably be a whole album campaign.
Burna Boy, on the other hand, will not retire. He will combust. There is something combustible about the way Burna moves through this industry, the beefs, the ego, the “I am the greatest alive” energy that he carries like a second passport. Retirement requires a kind of peaceful surrender that Burna Boy simply does not have in his body. This is a man who once had a public disagreement with half the continent and came back to win a Grammy. He does not slow down. He escalates. If anything, Burna will be that artist performing at 60, still telling the audience he invented Afrofusion while his knees quietly protest backstage. His version of retirement will probably be him taking a two year break to find himself, releasing a surprise EP anyway, and calling that peace.
Davido is the wildcard, and I say this with love, because OBO is genuinely one of the most human artists this generation has produced. The man has been through things publicly that would have ended other people’s careers, and each time he came back. But that is also the thing. Every comeback carries weight. The energy Davido brings to a stage, the way he performs like every show might be the last, that is beautiful. It is also exhausting, and you can see it. Davido is the one most likely to wake up one day and genuinely decide that family, peace, and his billions are enough. Not because the music has left him, but because life has taught him that there are things more valuable than a number one spot.
The rivalry angle makes this even more interesting. These three have spent the better part of a decade in a silent competition that everyone sees but nobody officially acknowledges. Wizkid does not mention Davido by name, Davido keeps performing like the numbers alone are the argument, and Burna occasionally says something that sends blogs into a frenzy. But strip the noise away and what you have are three men who genuinely pushed each other to global relevance. The race, however, has a cost. Longevity in music almost always belongs to the person who learns to pace themselves, and right now, not one of them looks particularly interested in slowing down.
My honest opinion is that Wizkid retires first, officially, with a farewell tour that gets postponed twice. Then Davido steps back quietly to be a father and a husband, announces it on Instagram with a long caption, everybody cries, and he comes back within eighteen months for one more record. Burna does not retire. Burna Boy becomes a legend who slowly transitions into mythology, the kind of artist younger musicians will reference in interviews while he is still alive and still somehow releasing music. He will be the last man standing, not because he is the most talented, that is a whole other argument, but because his stubbornness is genuinely supernatural. 😅
One of them will go first. Afrobeats will survive it. A new generation is already circling, and honestly, the genre has grown big enough that it no longer needs any single one of them to breathe. But right now, in this exact moment, while all three are still here and still relevant and still capable of shutting down a stage anywhere on the planet, this is the golden age. And golden ages, by definition, do not last forever.
Source: Danny Nsa Facebook
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