Ten years ago, if you had explained to the average Nigerian, or even the more enthusiastic pop culture consumers and stakeholders among the lot, that someday ‘livestreaming’ would be a full-blown sub-industry of its own, they would have raised eyebrows and then some. The most prominent livestreaming services at the time were Instagram and YouTube Live; the former, serving as a culture staple. And while both were commonly in use, they involved minimal interactions between the livestreamers—mostly celebrities—and viewers on the other end.
Fast forward to three days ago, Nigerian skitmaker and comedian Adesokan Adedeji Emmanuel, professionally known as Shank Comics or Shanks, was awarded the Best Streamer title at the 2026 SiGMA Africa Awards, held in Cape Town, South Africa. The Award show recognizes “leading companies and individuals across the continent’s rapidly growing gaming and technology sectors,” with the Best Streamer category, in particular, acknowledging “creators who have demonstrated consistency, audience engagement and impact within the online streaming industry.”
Shank was one of five African winners out of twenty-five in total and the only Nigerian, in a ceremony dominated by entities from Eastern and Southeastern Europe and Western Asia. That might seem like mere coincidence. And perhaps, it is. Perhaps it is the organisation’s way of ensuring an inclusive ceremony for an Award show with the ‘Africa’ tagline. Still, the significance of his selection can barely be understated. The Obafemi Awolowo University alumnus’ victory hints at a multiplicity of factors, and an effect of causes set in motion long before.
A quick walkthrough of the journey to this moment sees us begin during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. Starved for entertainment, and hungry for live content, Nigerians and the rest of the world turned to daily livestreams by celebrities and random individuals,representing a 300% increase between March and August 2020. The more famous runs include Tory Lanez’s Quarantine Live Radio and the Nigerian producers Versuses that saw Sarz take on Shizzi and Masterkraft take on Pheelz. Globalisation ensured that these different worlds overlapped, best remembered with episodes like the startling coupling of UK-based Ugandan model Eva Apio and DMW affiliate and internet personality, Father DMW, and Tory Lanez’s fabled “Ikogbonna, stop spamming the f**king flag” rant. This occurred vis-a-vis e-sports’ rise in popularity on Twitch and elsewhere.
In the four years that followed, the livestreaming market expanded substantially, driven by a new generation of streamers operating in uncharted territory. They were gamers but they were also influencers and good ol’ fashioned pranksters and internet goofs. By Q1 2023, names like Kai Cenat, iShowSpeed, xQc, Snake, Adin Ross, and Fanum accounted for heavyweight contributions to over 14.56 billion hours of live content. YouTube and Twitch alone had 8.123 and 5.281 billion hours, respectively.
The US dominated these figures, but streamers in countries like Canada, Spain, Brazil, and India, also represented a sizable chunk of these hours. Twitch’s ‘Just Chatting’ category where creators interact with their audience became the most dominant section of livestreaming anywhere on the internet. Not ones to be left behind, Nigerian and African creators followed suit, experimenting with different platforms and formats to find what clicked with our unique audience.
The boom came around in 2025. On March 25, 2025, Alté forefather Cruel Santino had a Subaru World Twitch livestream with one of the continent’s biggest exports, Afrobeats star Davido — as part of the promotional tour for the latter’s fifth album, 5ive. It was the moment that announced to the world that this phenomenon was primed for mass adoption on the continent. In a matter of months, other individuals carved out sizable virtual real estate. Skitmakers and influencers Carter Efe and the aforementioned Shankcomics’ became staples of the purple app (Twitch), TikTok, Kick and YouTube livestreams. More controversial figures like Geh Geh, Lord Lamba, Peller, and Ojo also garnered fanbases, resorting to bewildering on-screen antics to retain fans who joined these ‘chats.’
Shankcomics has distinguished himself in this sub-industry, scoring premium streams with Nigerian superstars Asake, Wizkid, and Olamide. In March 2024, when American streamer and one of the planet’s biggest streaming personalities Kai Cenat visited Nigeria for the first time, he served as an unofficial chaperone. Kai returned the favour by inviting him to the three-day content creator bootcamp, Streamer University, held at Akron University, Ohio, USA in May 2025. By the end of the bootcamp, he was $10,000 richer with 84,000 new Twitch followers, a figure that made him the most followed African streamer on the platform at the time. Even now, his over 260,000 follower-count, puts him only behind Carter Efe’s 597,000, on the continent. But while the latter has achieved this with unsavory content bordering on minstrelsy, Shank’s content has largely remained within the acceptable range of livestreaming discourse, with some exceptions.
By bestowing him with the award, SiGMA has given an institutional seal of approval to this often overlooked subset of new media. Like other digital interactive communication technologies before it, livestreaming has been approached with haughtiness by sections of the public. It’s an endeavour seen as lowbrow and time-wasting by older generations, much like reality TV before it. In reality (pun intended), livestreaming is a generation’s search for unscripted entertainment in a world with fewer interactive opportunities and endless communities. Shanks and his cohort are the prominent faces of a diverse sub-sector that extends to activities as banal as chess and music and film appreciation. Portraying popular streamers as the entirety of what’s obtainable on ‘live’ is reductionist. It takes away from the learning opportunities that exist astride entertainment—yes, learning (IShowSpeed’s recent 20-nation African tour is one of many examples).
This is not to say all streaming content fits in this mold. Nigeria is endemic for abrasive content by these livestreamers, some of whom command considerable offline fanbases. The job of such an award is to institutionalise livestreaming as part of the culture, but also what subsets deserve acknowledgement. Other streamers now know an award exists. At regional and national award levels, organisations might begin to consider outlier ‘livestreaming’ categories, much like the 2026 Golden Globes’ unique ‘Best Podcast’ category. It’s an incentive to innovate the product, aligning with corporate cultural values as with older media.
The Awards’ separation of the ‘Best Streamer’ and ‘Best Influencer’ categories also hints at an attempt to decouple new media roles. Nowadays, it’s not surprising to see individuals who triple as content creators, influencers, and creative directors, among other roles. Shanks himself identifies as the first two. Separating both awards— popular South African digital finance figure and Africa Under 40 CEO Awardee Thembi Shilenge took home the Influencer prize—shows how the informal sector is attaining more operational clarity. In Nigeria, broader Award ceremonies are still adapting. An example is Silverbird’s Man of the Year Awards, which just introduced an Influencer of the Year category at its 19th edition last year, only to discontinue in 2026.
Sadly, on closer examination, Shanks’ win spotlights just as many negatives, as it does positives. For an Award show about ‘Africans’, the inclusion of himself and Thembi Shingele felt more like an attempt at laundering the ceremony’s image. For context, the parent company behind the Summit at which the awards were held, SiGMA Group, has seven other summits internationally. You wouldn’t know from looking at the awardee list. It’s hard to believe there were no KYC solutions, innovations in sports betting, workplaces, or marketing campaigns worth awarding on the continent; which raises questions about the need for awards by us , rather than hurriedly celebrating the few externally-run ceremonies that include us. It’s inevitably a continuation of the conversations around the Grammys and Oscars, just in a different field.
More importantly, it raises the question of metrics. Award shows range from popularity contests to gatekeeping enforcement extravaganzas. From afar, the SiGMA Awards appears closer to the latter, an attempt at defining quality, like has been said before. It’s the continental award’s inaugural edition, setting the stage for forthcoming years, and thus a source of concern for metrics across the continent. The absence of a nominee list worsens attempts at parsing the rationale of the organisers.
Casting this spotlight back home, the question of metrics persists. Silverbird’s Man of The Year Awards deemed it fit to award Peller ‘Influencer of the Year’ despite parrotting harmful content to his young demographic of followers. Others that attempt to be specific and defy the ‘content creator’ box, like the Trendupp Awards end up with egregious shortlists and winners. How else does one explain King Mitchy being awarded the ‘Force of Social Good’ over folks like Tunde Onakoya, Aproko Doctor, and Asherkine or the hyper-misogynistic Ghe Ghe nominated as an ‘emerging force”? Especially as this is a non-voting Award. Such outcomes expose the fault that is trusting Award shows to define value. If quality becomes a matter of the quantity of plaques and statuettes accumulated, then quality — for all its subjectivity—becomes a relic.
That’s the dilemma of SiGMA’s conferment.
