Ahmedu Augustine Obiabo, known in showbiz circles as Blackface, seems to have armed himself enough for a battle as he has sent a notice to colleague musician, 2Baba to prepare for a showdown.
In an Instagram post with a hashtag #youareoverwith2019 which has a snake emoji at the end, Blackface states that 2Baba should brace himself for war.
“Can the war officially begin @official2baba?” he asks. “I say it has now officially [begun] even though you’ve been taking secret shots but you can come out in the open now. You know your career is going to end when this is finally over.”
Although Blackface did not mention the reason for the call for a battle, it is public knowledge that the two have not been at peace with each other for years. There has been a longstanding beef!
Blackface, 2Baba and one Faze used to be members of the Plantashun Boyz music group. However, they split in 2004 after 2Baba decided to go solo.
Blackface in an interview two years ago said he invested in the group and had meetings with business moguls Obi Asika and Olisa Adibua, who were just about creating Storm Records to sign a better deal for the group only for 2Baba to call it quits.
“We already had a plan, but 2face wanted to do something different,” he said. “I and Faze were surprised. ‘How come you saying that now’. Olisa told me we were going to do something different, that it wasn’t about Nigeria this time; that he was taking Plantashun Boiz to the next level, which is out of the shores of Nigeria, Africa.”
2Baba in response noted that he left the group due to what he describes as “normal conflict”.
He said: “There wasn’t any quarrel or clash of egos as such. Just the fact that Nigeria was not too conducive for a group to survive for long like the long-surviving Irish pop group U2. Let me just put it like that. We came together and at a point had to go our separate ways due to the normal conflicts between people.
“I was the first person that went solo. I just woke up one day and told them straight off that I wanted to go out there and do my own thing. As to be expected, they didn’t take it lightly but in the end, everybody saw reason and we had to part. We were all talented bunch and we felt we could survive individually.”
That’s not all. There was another eruption between Blackface and 2Baba after the latter released ‘African Queen’ a piece which became the hottest song on the ‘Face2Face‘ album. Blackface claimed he wrote the song during their days as Plantashun Boiz.
The enmity and tension was rekindled in 2015, when Blackface again claimed he wrote ‘Let Somebody Love You’, a song which was on 2Baba’s second album, ‘Ascension’.
Last year, the management of 2Baba slapped Blackface with a N50 million lawsuit for accusing their artiste of intellectual theft.