The record that probably no one saw coming after just two editions of a competition: Wizkid has now won NotJustOk’s Afrobeats Rumble back to back, making him the only artist to have lifted the title twice.
It is a clean sweep of the competition’s entire history, which is a wild thing to be able to say about anyone.
The Afrobeats Rumble launched in 2024 as a 64-artist knockout tournament, and Wizkid came through the whole thing without dropping the title.
He beat Rema in the semifinal, then turned around and dismantled Burna Boy in the final by a margin that was not even close, 72% to 28%, to become the inaugural champion.
That kind of dominant final scoreline tends to generate two reactions. Wizkid’s fanbase, known for mobilising hard in fan votes, celebrated it as proof of his standing in the culture, while others pointed out that tournament-style fan polls can reflect online organisation as much as they reflect actual popularity on the ground.
The 2025 edition came back with a slightly different setup. This time, the 64 spots were not just handed out, they were earned through data pulled from NotJustOk’s Afrobeats Power Ranking, with cumulative points from January to July 2025 deciding who made the cut. It was a more structured entry process, and Wizkid qualified and went on to win again.
Burna Boy was in the 2025 bracket too, but the draw placed the two Nigerian heavyweights on opposite sides, meaning a repeat of the 2024 final never materialised.
That is a detail worth sitting with, because it leaves open the question of what a rematch might have looked like after a full year of new music and shifting fan sentiment.
Rema, who fell to Wizkid in the 2024 semifinal, was also part of the conversation around both editions.
His presence in the bracket each year reflects where he sits in the current Afrobeats conversation, firmly in the upper tier, even if the tournament results have not gone his way against Wizkid specifically.
What makes the back-to-back win feel like more than just a social media moment is the consistency of it. Fan votes can be chaotic, unpredictable, and easily swung by a single viral moment or a coordinated push from a niche corner of the internet. Winning once could be that.
Winning twice, across two separate editions with different formats and different brackets, starts to look like something more deliberate.
Wizkid now holds every Afrobeats Rumble title that exists, and the competition is only two years old. The 2026 edition, whenever it comes, will carry a different kind of weight, because now there is actually a streak to talk about.
