Afrobeats can shut down arenas and still look leaderless. That was the charge on Conversations With Kenni when host Kehinde Ajose put DJ Big N’s recent plea to Teemirror and asked what ingredient the culture is missing. The singer’s answer was not a missing hook. It was a missing industry.
Ajose noted the contradiction first. Nigerian acts are everywhere, packing rooms and owning nights, yet the synergy keeps slipping. He pointed to DJ Big N, born Nonso Temisan Ajufo, who in August 2026 published an open letter to Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy. The veteran DJ did not demand a joint single. He asked the so-called Big Three to sit down without cameras, managers or fan armies and treat unity as the last mountain left.
“Come to the table even if it’s just once. Maybe your greatest collaboration isn’t even a song,” he wrote.
Teemirror did not start with the three kings. He started with the house they are supposed to live in.
“In every setting that there’s no structure, there’s bound to be missing links, failure here and there. Nigeria operates a music industry that works on imagination. The industry is not real.”
In his telling, Afrobeats has stars, streams and swagger. What it does not have is a working centre. If the scaffolding existed, he said, systems would drive the rest: narratives, peace talks, calendars, consequences.
He named the bodies that are supposed to do that work.
“You have supposed bodies who are supposed to control narratives and all of that and they doing nothing. You have COSON. Yeah. You have PMAN, you have other of that other bodies that are supposed to guide whatever happens in industry, settle rifts, plan new events and all of that. None of them are active. Everybody’s working independently.”
Then the punch.
“How do you expect headless chickens to come together and be productive?”
COSON, the Copyright Society of Nigeria, and PMAN, the Performing Musicians Employers’ Association of Nigeria, were built to collect royalties, defend creators and keep order. In practice they have spent years in public fights over licences, levies and legitimacy. The Nigerian Copyright Commission has treated MCSN as the approved collective management organisation for musical works, while COSON has continued to argue that musicians are being shortchanged. PMAN, for its part, has faced factional battles even as local chapters still hold events. The documented mess underneath it is real enough.
That is why Big N’s letter lands the way it does. The Big Three tag has followed Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy for a decade. They have shared bills on rare nights, including a 2024 Oando end-of-year show in Lagos, but a joint project still feels like folklore. Music executive Ubi Franklin has said the competitive air around them makes a three-way record hard. Tiwa Savage has gone further and attacked the “Big Three” story itself, arguing that the continent is larger than three men. Odumodublvck has tried to stretch the list to seven. The argument keeps changing shape because no official table exists to settle it.
Teemirror’s point is that you cannot scold three superstars into harmony when the associations meant to referee the street are themselves scattered. Independent hustle built the boom. Independent hustle, he says, is also why the boom cannot hold a meeting.