In 2019, rapper Medikal won Best Rapper at the VGMA. Strongman, who had lost the award to him, decided he disagreed with the outcome publicly. What followed was one of the most closely watched rap beefs in Ghana’s recent history, a back-and-forth in diss tracks that split the country’s hip-hop audience and forced an answer to a question Ghanaian music rarely asks directly: who is actually the best rapper here?
What did not follow, for a long time, was financial comfort. Strongman has been candid about the gap between his reputation and his income, and the story behind that gap is not unique to him. It is the story of what it costs to be a lyricist in a market that rewards hooks.
How He Built the Reputation
Nana Sei, known professionally as Strongman Burner, started building his name through competitions. He won Focus FM’s Freestyle Friday in 2010, KFM’s Freestyle Saturday in 2011, and the inaugural edition of Tha Next Big Thing in GH Hip-Hop in 2012. Three competition wins in three years gave him a reputation in Accra’s rap community before he had released a formal project.
He signed to MicBurnez Music, recorded, and built a following among Ghanaian listeners who cared specifically about lyrical content. In 2017, that reputation landed him a spot at Sarkcess Music, Sarkodie’s label, which at that point was the most credible rap imprint in Ghana.
The Sarkcess Years and What They Revealed
He spent two years at Sarkcess Music. His contract expired in April 2019, and he left. What he said about the period afterward was unusually direct for an artist discussing a former label situation.
“I think when I was about to leave Sarkcess, that was when I started to make money in music,” he stated publicly. He described having money before Sarkcess that he could have used to buy a car, spending it instead on a phone, and going through the label period without the financial return that the critical recognition might have suggested was coming.
He has also acknowledged what Sarkcess provided that money cannot measure: visibility, structure, and the association with Sarkodie’s name. His departure was not a grievance. It was a transition. “My mind feels clear of certain constraints,” he said after leaving.
Sarkodie noted in 2023 that he still pays former Sarkcess artists ongoing royalties. Strongman has addressed this publicly, neither denying it nor framing it as a point of contention.
The Medikal Beef and What It Proved
The 2019 VGMA Best Rapper result, which gave the award to Medikal over Strongman, triggered a public exchange of diss tracks. The beef became a referendum on what Ghanaian audiences value in rap. Medikal was commercially dominant, consistently producing records that charted and that non-rap listeners knew. Strongman was technically superior on a verse-by-verse basis, which is a different kind of dominance and one that VGMA voters did not weight more heavily.
Strongman later said he would not have responded to Medikal’s diss tracks if he had known in advance how the situation would unfold, not because he lost the exchange, but because the context was not what he had assumed it to be.
The two have since reconciled. They released a collaborative track called “Bossu.” Medikal appeared on Strongman’s 2022 EP Buokrom Boy, alongside Efya, Sista Afia, and Mr Drew, a project that returned Strongman to his hometown of Kumasi’s Buokrom neighbourhood as its thematic anchor.
Going Independent and Building Strong Empire
After leaving Sarkcess, Strongman founded Strong Empire, his own label. His album “10 AM” featured a range of collaborators including Medikal, Quamina MP, Kelvyn Boy, Wendy Shay, Worlasi, DopeNation, and Akwaboah, a lineup that reflected how thoroughly he had rebuilt his network on independent terms.
The financial situation he described from the Sarkcess era began to shift after independence. This is a pattern that has appeared repeatedly in Ghanaian rap: the label period providing infrastructure but limiting earnings, the post-label period requiring the artist to rebuild from a lower profile but with more direct financial access to what they generate.
The Larger Problem His Career Illustrates
Strongman is not an outlier. He is an example of a structural problem in Ghanaian hip-hop: the market does not pay lyricists at the rate it pays artists who make music that converts easily into background noise. A rapper who wins three rap competitions, loses a VGMA award to a more commercial rival, and spends a decade as one of the most respected technical voices in the country should have a financial story that matches the critical one. For most of his career, Strongman’s did not.
He has never pretended otherwise. The honesty with which he has discussed the gap between reputation and income is part of what makes his career worth examining. He built something real in a market that does not always reward real things, and he is still building it.
The question of whether Ghana’s rap market will eventually correct toward rewarding technical ability more consistently does not have a clean answer. What Strongman’s career demonstrates is that it is possible to survive the gap, build ownership of your own output, and come out the other side with something that is genuinely yours.
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