Ayo Animashaun finds it funny. In an Instagram story this morning, the Headies founder wrote that “Tom, Dick and Harry will submit entries to foreign award bodies that don’t even care about them and proudly post about it,” then skip the Headies and “complain about not being nominated.” He named nobody, and he didn’t have to. The Recording Academy’s first-round ballot has been open since Monday, and Nigerian timelines have spent the week passing around Grammy entries.
A few hours later he posted again, and this time he sounded like a man answering for Toronto: as long as the artistes “understand why taking The Headies to the moon sometimes is the right move, and our sponsors see the vision, we can stand firmly by our decisions.”
“Tom, Dick and Harry” points away from the top. The Nigerian names loudest in this Grammy cycle are Davido with Oriadé, Tems, Ayra Starr and Asake, and every one of them is on his own 18th Headies list, from Davido’s 5ive in Afrobeats Album of the Year to Asake’s six nominations. By his own account you have to submit to be nominated, which means their teams filled in both forms, and both were open in the same July weeks. The charge falls on everyone further down who posted an entry this week, and he left all of them unnamed.
The foreign award show has been Animashaun’s measuring stick for a while. Explaining the move to Atlanta for the 15th Headies in March 2022, he said he had wanted “the production company that produces the Grammy, the Oscar and the Superbowl,” and that production in America was cheaper and better. The night at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre still had Anthony Anderson, the American co-host, complaining on stage that the A-listers hadn’t come. The show stayed in Atlanta for 2023, came back to Lagos in April 2025 for an edition that still had unread categories at 3:30 a.m., and in June he picked Toronto because the city “offers the partnerships, infrastructure, international visibility, and economic support required to deliver The Headies at the scale that African music deserves.” “The Headies is taking home to the world,” he said.
The world is still waiting. On Oct 10, thirteen days out, the Headies pushed the Toronto finale to April 10 and 11, 2027, with a bigger Nigeria-Canada programme as the only reason given. The second story is his answer to everyone who grumbled.
The global rise Animashaun keeps citing for taking his show abroad is the same pull that sent Nigeria’s biggest acts after foreign trophies. Now he is scolding the artists who followed it. Whatever he thinks of Tom, Dick and Harry, they will hear from Los Angeles first: the Grammys name their nominees on Nov 16 and hand out awards on Feb 7, and the 18th Headies, whose nominees have been public since August, hand out theirs in Toronto two months after that.