Burna And Tems Are Nominated. Just Not In The Category That Was Ours.
Lagos · Friday 21 August 2026
The full 2026 MTV Video Music Awards nomination list is out. Burna Boy and Tems are on it. Best Afrobeats, the category MTV created in 2022 and which Nigerian artists won every year it existed, is not.
Ten Nigerian outlets covered this within a day and almost all of them found the same awkward construction: nominations secured despite the scrapped category. The word doing the work in that sentence is despite, and it is doing more work than it can carry.
Two readings, both defensible
The optimistic reading is that a ring-fenced category is a holding pen, and that being nominated in the general categories is the outcome the ring fence was supposed to lead to. On that view, MTV removing Best Afrobeats while Nigerians appear elsewhere on the list is not a demotion. It is graduation.
The pessimistic reading is that a category is a guaranteed slot on a broadcast, a guaranteed performance opportunity, and a guaranteed line in every article about the show. Removing it removes all three, and two nominations in general categories do not replace what a dedicated award delivered every year without fail.
| Dedicated category | General nomination | |
|---|---|---|
| Guaranteed African winner | Yes | No |
| Guaranteed broadcast slot | Usually | No |
| Competes against global pop | No | Yes |
| Counts as mainstream recognition | Contested | Yes |
The trade the genre has just been handed, whether or not it asked for it.
Both of these are true, which is why the argument has been circular all week. The useful question is not which reading is correct. It is what the removal tells us about how MTV now sees the audience.
What a category actually is
Award categories are not neutral descriptions of music. They are commercial decisions about which audience a broadcaster believes it needs to serve to hold its viewers. MTV created Best Afrobeats when African streaming numbers made it look like an underserved market with growth in it. That was a business judgment, not a cultural one.
Removing it is also a business judgment. It says either that the audience is now well enough served through the general categories, or that the segment did not deliver the viewership the category was created to capture. MTV has not said which, and it is not going to.
A genre category is a bet a broadcaster makes on an audience. When it disappears, the honest question is whether the bet paid off, not whether anyone was disrespected.
The part that should concern Nigerian labels
Here is the structural problem, and it has nothing to do with MTV. Nigerian Afrobeats has spent five years measuring its international progress in award nominations because nominations are countable, quotable and free. They are also close to worthless as a commercial indicator.
What matters commercially is streams in high-value territories, ticket sales in rooms above 5,000 capacity, publishing income and sync placements. Those numbers exist, labels have them, and almost none of them are ever published. So the public conversation runs on the one metric that is visible, and that metric has just become less available.
The genre would be in a stronger position if it could answer the question directly. How many paying listeners does Nigerian music have in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in France? Not how many nominations. How many people paid. Until somebody publishes that, every award season will produce the same argument with no way to settle it.
Burna and Tems, specifically
The two Nigerians on the list are also the two least dependent on it, which is worth noticing. Both have long since crossed into a position where they are booked, streamed and paid on the basis of a global audience rather than a regional category.
That is precisely why their nominations do not settle the argument. Burna Boy and Tems were always going to be fine. The question a dedicated category answered was what happens to the artist two tiers below them, the one with a large Lagos following and a growing diaspora audience, for whom a category nomination was a realistic first step onto an international stage.
That step has been removed. Nothing has replaced it. Whether that is graduation or demotion depends entirely on where you were standing when it happened.
Reporting: Premium Times, Vanguard, The Nation, Legit.ng, Olorisupergal and Brand Communicator.
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