Davido spent Saturday telling Nigerian entertainers, himself included, that they have stayed too quiet on insecurity. “We dey fuck up, I won’t lie, including me. We need to speak up. It’s too much injustice going on. Our country don go,” he wrote, joining the wave of reactions to the abduction of teachers and students in Oyo State.
A critic, the X user Princess Luna, wasn’t moved. She called the post “performative rubbish” and told him to take it back to his “City Boys group chat.” Davido replied that he has no such membership: “I am not part of any City Boy group. When I called out the government on American media, you guys rained curses on me.” He added that he has been friends with “ST” – Seyi Tinubu, the president’s son, for years, “and that’s where it stops,” saying he calls and complains to him directly.
That clarification is doing a lot of work. The City Boy Movement is a pro-Tinubu group, and Davido’s close friend, Cubana Chief Priest, is a known member of it, so the question about his proximity wasn’t baseless. His answer draws a line between personal friendship and political alignment, and asks to be taken at his word that the line is firm.
The harder context is that Davido is, right now, on a break from music to campaign for his uncle, Osun governor Ademola Adeleke. He chairs a youth mobilisation team for that campaign. So the man asking to be read as a free-speaking critic of government is also, this season, a working political operator for one. His friendship with the president’s son sits next to that, not separate from it.
None of this proves the frustration is fake. Davido has criticised the federal government before and taken heat for it, which is part of what he’s reminding people of. But sincerity and self-interest aren’t mutually exclusive here, and his own career history shows how fast the music-versus-politics line blurs for him. He has feuded publicly over Osun elections before, when his PDP loyalties were the whole story. The “I complain to ST in person” defence may be true and still tell us less about his independence than he’d like.
The cleaner read is the simplest one: a celebrity deeply embedded in power said something that is probably heartfelt and also happens to protect his position. Princess Luna heard only the second part. Davido insists on the first. Both can be looking at the same post.
