Burna Boy turned down $5 million to keep smoking. He launched his own cannabis brand while his country still criminalizes the plant. His biggest song has “I need igbo and shayo” as its hook. Now he’s singing the World Cup anthem with Shakira. Here’s who he actually is.
On May 15, 2026, Burna Boy and Shakira released “Dai Dai,” the official anthem of the FIFA World Cup 2026. He’ll co-headline the halftime show at the July 19 final alongside Madonna and BTS. For the first time in World Cup history, the final gets a halftime performance. And one of the three acts headlining it built his entire identity — musically, commercially, personally — around cannabis.
That’s not incidental. It’s the point.
The $5 million he left on the table
In 2023, during a live performance, Burna Boy improvised a verse about turning down a $5 million offer to perform in Dubai. The reason: cannabis is banned there, and he wasn’t willing to go anywhere where he couldn’t smoke.
“Me I no dey like to dey go where dem no go gree allow me smoke igbo,” he sang. Igbo is the Nigerian term for cannabis. The story circulated globally because it was exactly the kind of principled move that builds real loyalty: a man choosing the plant over the payday.
“It’s just kind of hypocritical out there. They try to make it seem like if you smoke weed you’ll just go mad in Nigeria. Everybody smokes it. It’s just a topic no one wants to talk about.”
Burna Boy, Home Grown Radio, Los Angeles, 2021
Nigeria remains one of the highest cannabis-consuming countries in Africa, and one of the few where it stays fully illegal. Burna Boy named that contradiction publicly and repeatedly, at a time when few Nigerian artists of his …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
