Tekno opens up about the throat crisis that silenced him at his career peak, forcing surgery abroad and over $1 million in refunded shows.
Imagine being at the very top of your game, then suddenly losing the one thing that got you there. That’s what happened to Afrobeats star Tekno between 2017 and 2019, when a throat condition stole his voice and nearly his career. He’s finally opening up about it, and the numbers alone are staggering.
Speaking on Cool FM, the singer revealed just how brutal it got. He described refunding well over a million dollars worth of show fees, money he’d already committed to and, in some cases, had to pay back out of pocket even as medical bills mounted.
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Finding help wasn’t simple either. Tekno said he searched globally for a doctor who could actually fix the problem, eventually landing in New York for surgery after concluding Nigeria couldn’t offer the standard of care he needed.
That detail says a lot. For an artist whose voice is literally his livelihood, settling for anything less wasn’t an option, even if it meant flying across the world at the peak of a crisis.
Tekno joins a surprising list of major singers whose voices have betrayed them. Adele famously cancelled a North American tour in 2011 for vocal cord surgery. John Mayer went through something similar the same year, a hiatus that changed his sound permanently. Voices, it turns out, are fragile even for the biggest names in music.
For Tekno, the ordeal wasn’t just about lost income. It reshaped how he sees his career altogether. He’s spoken about walking away from that period with a deeper sense of gratitude, simply for being able to make music again.
That renewed appreciation shows up in his latest project, an 8-track EP called Where Did Love Go, which carries the genre-blending sound that first made him a star in the 2010s.
It’s easy to see a hitmaker on stage and forget how much can go wrong behind the scenes. Tekno’s story is a reminder that even the biggest voices in Afrobeats are human, and that comebacks are never guaranteed.
