According to Akon, Wizkid was a local artist before he started making a name for himself

The Senegalese-American musician Akon has come clean about his involvement with the meteoric rise to fame of Wizkid, a Nigerian Afrobeats sensation.

In 2008, he signed the Starboy crooner to his record label and cleaned him up, claiming that he was only a local singer.

Akon recently made the assertion on an episode of the Bagfuel Brigade podcast that he was instrumental in the rise of Afrobeats in the late aughts and early 2010s by nurturing the careers of several Nigerian musicians and providing them with access to larger audiences.

What we now know as Afrobeats was born in 2008, when I was based in Nigeria. According to him, everyone there can confirm it.

When we first began formally signing artists from Nigeria, it was Wizkid. We continued by signing P-Square, the first [Nigerian] group to achieve international success.

Before we touched Wizkid, he was only a local Nigerian sensation, but that changed when we reached out to him.

Not that I want to claim responsibility for all that happened, but I will say that Afrobeats would still be where it was in 2008 in Nigeria if we hadn’t done what we did. I am quite certain of that.

Because the only thing that the Nigerian musicians back then understood was the artistic part of music, I introduced the business side to Afrobeats. It was unattached from any business or infrastructure.