Burna Boy Turned Down $5 Million to Keep Smoking. Now He’s at the World Cup.

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 stature were willing to.

BRKFST: his cannabis brand

On October 7, 2022, Burna Boy launched his own cannabis brand — BRKFST — in South Beach, Miami, in partnership with Jokes Up/Ice Kream. The launch coincided with Miami Carnival and included a pop-up, a branded brunch and a festival headline set. The brand came in multiple formats: flower, tea, snacks and other consumables. The slogan: #BrkfstIsSmokers.

The name is a double reference. It comes from his 2022 smash “Last Last,” in which he sings “na everybody go chop breakfast” — Nigerian slang for heartbreak — and also “I need igbo and shayo.” The brand connects the cannabis to the emotional context: smoking as a way of processing pain, of starting the day, of staying grounded. Morning weed as breakfast. The metaphor writes itself.

The launch put him in company with Wiz Khalifa, Snoop Dogg and a small list of global artists who have moved from cannabis culture into cannabis commerce. The difference is that Burna Boy did it while his home country still criminalizes the plant — a deliberate act of friction, not just a business move.

Last Last: the song that said it out loud

“Last Last” spent eight weeks at number one on the US Afrobeats charts and 74 weeks on the chart total. Its hook — “I need igbo and shayo” — is now one of the most recognized lines in contemporary Afropop. It didn’t hide the cannabis reference. It put it at the center of the most commercially successful moment of his career.

That wasn’t an accident. Cannabis and Afropop have been inseparable since Fela Kuti, and Burna Boy — whose grandfather managed Fela — carries that lineage deliberately. He grew up in Port Harcourt with those roots already in his DNA. The plant isn’t a brand element for him. It’s a cultural inheritance.

Who he is beyond weed

Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu was born in 1991 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He debuted in 2012 with “Like to Party,” built his catalog album by album, and by 2021 had won the Grammy for Best Global Music Album for Twice As Tall — a landmark not just for him but for African music as a whole.

The stadium run that followed is hard to overstate. He headlined the London Stadium in front of 60,000 people — the first African artist to do so. The Stade de France with 80,000. Madison Square Garden sold out. Coachella. Glastonbury. Afro Nation. His sound — afrobeat, reggae, dancehall, hip-hop and soul fused into something that doesn’t need a genre label — traveled without losing anything.

In 2025 he dropped his eighth studio album, No Sign of Weakness, walked the Met Gala in a custom suit by British-Ghanaian designer Ozwald Boateng, and signed a multi-year global ambassador deal with Swiss sportswear brand ON. The man moves between worlds without code-switching. That’s the thing.

Now: the World Cup

“Dai Dai” with Shakira drops on the same day as this article. The song is the official anthem of FIFA World Cup 2026, benefiting the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund with a goal of raising $100 million. Shakira is donating royalties. Sony Music is matching the first $250,000. Burna Boy is headlining the halftime show at the July 19 final alongside Shakira, Madonna and BTS.

For anyone who’s been following his trajectory, the World Cup isn’t a surprise. It’s the logical endpoint of a decade of building an audience that didn’t need to be explained to anyone — it just kept growing. For anyone who hasn’t been following: welcome to Burna Boy.

He turned down $5 million before he’d do a show where he couldn’t smoke. He launched a cannabis brand while his government still locks people up for it. He put “I need igbo and shayo” at the center of one of the biggest Afropop songs ever recorded. And now he’s singing the anthem of the most-watched sporting event on the planet.

None of that required him to compromise anything.