Is Ilyas El Maliki Africa’s Biggest Streamer? What the Numbers Say

Lists naming Africa’s biggest streamer keep appearing, and fans argue over them on X. Ilyas El Maliki tops most of them. Here is what those lists measure, what Kick’s own figures showed on 4 November 2026, and where the answer changes.

What the published rankings say

Three rankings published in 2026 used the same measure: followers on Kick and Twitch combined. Pulse Nigeria and Vanguard, in January, both put Ilyas first with 847,000 followers, ahead of Nigeria’s Carter Efe with 560,500 and Shank Comics with 258,000. Peller was fifth with 183,900. StatiSense’s update in April kept the same order at the top: Ilyas on 869,200, Carter Efe on 644,000, Shank Comics on 264,000 and Peller on 222,000. Pulse called Ilyas “arguably the biggest streamer in Africa”.

Most names on all three lists were Nigerian, and most of them stream mainly on Twitch. The lists left out several large North African channels on Kick, which the table below adds.

What Kick shows today

The table lists the African streamers named in those rankings or in Streams Charts’ 2025 top 10 for the Middle East and North Africa, with the follower counts shown on their Kick channels on 4 November 2026.

Carter Efe streams mainly on Twitch, where StatiSense counted 644,000 followers in April, so his Kick figure understates his audience.

Ilyas has passed one million followers on Kick, up from the 847,000 used in the January rankings. That is more than the 1,037,669 of the 20th channel in Dexerto’s list of Kick’s most-followed channels, updated on 30 October. The next African channel in the table, Egypt’s 3mr, has about 359,000 fewer.

Peak viewers: the widest gap

Followers show reach. Peak viewers show how many people watch at the same moment. Streams Charts recorded 601,000 concurrent viewers on Ilyas’s channel on 10 January 2025, during the Kings World Cup Nations, the third-highest peak of any Kick streamer that year. In August 2026, Peller said 100,000 people had joined one of his livestreams within 20 minutes. K24 Digital reported that figure from his own statement, with no independent measurement.

Regular streams draw far less than record nights. In late October 2026, most of Ilyas’s ordinary broadcasts peaked at around 19,000 to 21,000 viewers in this site’s log, and the Kings League MENA Final Four reached 69,076. The full breakdown is in Eight Days on Kick.

Hours watched

Streams Charts’ ranking of the most-watched streamers in the Middle East and North Africa in 2025, all on Kick, placed Ilyas fifth with 27.01 million hours watched. He finished ahead of the other Moroccan and Egyptian names in that top 10: Bougassaa was eighth with 16.17 million, 3mr ninth with 14.96 million and Vodkafunky tenth with 13.79 million.

Where he is not first

The rankings above count Kick and Twitch. TikTok is a different contest. Wikipedia credits Peller with 17 million TikTok followers and a 512,000-view stream, which it describes as the highest-viewed in Africa. Legit.ng, citing Premium Times, reported in May 2025 that his TikTok live with Davido drew 389,800 viewers. TikTok counts live audiences differently from Kick’s concurrent viewer figure, so these numbers cannot be set side by side with the ones above.

So, is he Africa’s biggest streamer?

On the platforms these rankings measure, every figure checked here puts Ilyas first among the streamers they name: the most Kick followers, a peak audience far above any figure reported for the others here, and the most hours watched among the Moroccan and Egyptian streamers in Streams Charts’ 2025 list. Counted across all of social media, including TikTok, the answer depends on how each platform is weighed.

The Kick counts were read from each channel’s public Kick page on 4 November 2026 and change every day. A large channel missing from the table was not named in the rankings or lists used here. For his live numbers as they happen, see the live page, or read how he became one of Kick’s biggest streamers.