For The Unsung Who Made The Songs

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

There is an odd kind of immortality that comes not from headlines but from habit – the steady, patient practice of noticing. Adewale Olomu, the young reporter who died in 1994, practised that particular art with a zeal that made the ordinary seem important. He did not chase glamour; he excavated it. He prized the studio engineer, the backup vocalist, the distribution clerk and the sleeve designer – the invisible cogs that keep the music machine turning. That insistence on looking sideways, on celebrating workmanship rather than mere celebrity, is the founding breath of the Wale Olomu Memorial Awards and Roundtable. Three years on, the idea has become an institution because institutions reward consistency and, occasionally, mad devotion.

When I wrote an opening note in 2023 – a preface to what felt then like a daring experiment – I suggested WOMA-R might become a place where history and humility meet. The inaugural year taught us two lessons. First, people hunger for a ceremony that honours craft, not only chart positions; second, a roundtable that favours frank conversation over flattery will always draw a crowd. The 2023 roundtable on TopRadio 90.9 FM set that tone: serious, conversational, occasionally deliciously uncomfortable. We were less about red carpets and more about redressing the ledger.

By 2024 we had proof that the model worked. A compact, three-panellist format – brief, disciplined, and sharply curated – proved the sweet spot. The Roundtable remained conversational but rigorous: industry elders, young practitioners and critical writers sat in the same room (or the same Zoom square) and did the necessary thing – they interrogated the ecosystem. We heard from practitioners who had spanned decades and those who had just learnt to monetise a viral clip. We kept the running time tight, the questions pointed, and the music in the margins generous. That year’s Awards recognised the long-haulers – the people who had kept the lights on even when the playlists ignored them – and the public response made it plain that the appetite for conscience-led celebration is not a niche.

Which brings us to 2025. The third edition carries the theme: “Unsung Legends Who Shaped Today’s Glory.” It is an unapologetically corrective theme – a declaration that the shiny present did not materialise out of nowhere. It has antecedents, apprentices and a chorus of unnamed hands. The Roundtable on Saturday, 13 December, and the Awards on Saturday, 20 December, will be aired live on TopRadio 90.9 FM. We are back with the talk that matters first – conversation before confetti – because if you want to understand why an artist is “now”, you must first understand where he or she came from and who held the mic steady for them.

This year’s panel confirms the WOMA-R tendency to mix voices that can both sing and analyse. Wunmi Obe brings the rare combination of stage craft and corporate acuity; Olumide Iyanda carries the institutional memory of a newsroom that refused to be merely decorative; Jide Taiwo offers the historian’s patience and the critic’s appetite for nuance; and Jimi Akinniyi arrives with the streetwise, broadcast-trained pragmatism that keeps any conversation honest and occasionally laugh-out-loud real. Aralola Olamuyiwa (Ara) adds the performer-philosopher’s clarity – an artist who understands how cultural reporting can lift an indigenous instrument from the margins to the world stage; while Kayefi Osha supplies the perspective of a new-generation singer-songwriter navigating both Nigerian and diaspora ecosystems, where media framing can make or unmake momentum. These are not cameos; they are meaningful interlocutors who know the beats, the bylines, and the unspoken truths between them.

We will, of course, salute our honourees on 20 December. Three Lifetime Achievement Awards and a cluster of Special Recognition prizes will be announced that breakfast hour – names that, by design, are not the celebrity flavour-of-the-week but the names that stitch our industry together. The decision to reveal the Special Recognition laureates in the early hours of the Awards day is deliberate: ceremony and surprise walk hand in hand, but respect must always come first.

What WOMA-R does, quietly and stubbornly, is insist upon a fuller record. Nigerian entertainment has long suffered an imperial amnesia where the loudest publicists dictate the archive. Our modest intervention is to create a corrective ledger – a programme of recognition that preserves primary testimony, creates better civic memory, and offers role models for young practitioners who may otherwise believe that success is only a shortcut or a scandal away. If you are a young producer who thinks the only path to relevance is viral soundbite, come to a WOMA roundtable and listen; if you are an older editor who worries the discipline has been diluted, come and reclaim the argument. We are, after all, in the business of collective memory.

There is also a soft political project here – not party politics, but the politics of valuation. What do we value in an industry that so easily confuses attention with worth? By naming and celebrating the unsung, we tilt the scale. We model an industry that values workmanship, documentation and ethical stewardship over flimsy metrics. Tony Okoroji’s insistence on rights and royalties, Kenny Ogungbe’s commercial nous, Laolu Akins’ production wisdom – these aren’t just fond memories; they are a curriculum. WOMA-R creates a syllabus out of stories.

Our format remains pragmatic and purposeful. The Roundtable is compact by design: a tight set of voices, a sharp line of inquiry, and a refusal to be merely nostalgic. The Awards moment is ceremonial, yes, but it is also pedagogical: every citation, every short melody and every testimony is selected to teach as well as honour. And let us be frank – in an era when events are often exercises in self-advertisement, WOMA-R persists in being slightly old-fashioned: we still believe that honour should educate.

There will be laughs. There will be arguments. There will be memories that make you wince and others that make you stand upright. And if, by the end of it, a young person watching on YouTube decides to study studio craft rather than chase a single, then we will have succeeded. If an auditor in a record company decides to be less coy with sales figures because they’ve heard the argument and felt the shame, then we will have succeeded. The big wins are small and accumulative.

So, on behalf of a steering committee stubborn enough to keep the lantern lit, I invite you to join us. Tune into the Roundtable on 13 December; listen, watch or stream the 90-minute Awards on 20 December (from 7.30am). Bring your curiosity. Bring your appetite for truth. Bring your memories. If you knew Wale, bring his stories; if you didn’t, bring your ears. WOMA-R is not merely a ritual of remembrance – it is a functional history lesson delivered in real time.

After all, history is not only what we read in textbooks; it is what we remember together, aloud, in the company of those who shaped the soundtrack. If Wale taught us anything, it was this: look for the people who make the music possible, and give them their due. The rest, as they say, will sing for itself.