Nigerian rapper M.I Abaga shared an insight into why it took him so long to respond to multiple shades allegedly thrown at him by his colleague in the music industry, Vector.
Before the strong contenders settled their beef, M.I said top music executives and other important figures in different sectors influenced his decision to keep quiet.
He eventually responded to Vector in 2019 when he felt the time was right. Both M.I and Vector released diss tracks, shaded each other in all the songs.
M.I dropped ‘The Viper’ to disgrace the wordsmith, but Vector replied to him with ‘Judas the Rat’, a diss song hammered on M.I
In a chat #WithChud, M.I spoke on the constant hate he got from Vector, he said; “Anytime I’ve been asked about Vector, I speak glowingly about him. I have called him one of the best freestylers, called him a great artist. You can check my tweets. Type MI Vector and see what I’ve said about him,” MI said.
“If you find me one clip, ever, of Vector saying something nice about me, one clip, I’ll apologise. Every single time I’m involved in one form of issue, he pops up, says something about me and it’s always something negative.
“It’s always shade. At some point, I just got tired. There also came the narrative that MI is not going to respond cause he’s scared. And I think that situation was very unique because I had just started.”
“The thing was heating up. Every egbon (senior) in music business called me and told me to say nothing,” MI said.
“I got on a plane someday and met this West African director of a multinational company, a powerful woman, who was in tune with what was going on. She also advised I don’t respond to whoever it is that’s saying things about me.
“I tweeted and she tells me ‘you see, your tweet pops up on my screen, so be careful what you say on your platform’.
“Even coming to that situation which I hadn’t prepared for before, I had to be like, ‘hey you know what, I can’t respond willingly, I can’t talk about this the way I want to talk about it but it was time for me to say something’.”
Despite the bad bloods over who the superior rapper is, M.I and Vector settled their rift, made up and released a collaborative song titled ‘Crown of Clay’, to tell their fans they are now in good terms.