Nigerian Afrobeats star Davido: Other things excite me more than music

When Nigerian Afrobeats star Davido talks about music, he’s calm and collected. But bring up politics or charity work and he jumps out of his chair.

“I’ve been making music for 11 years,” he told BBC DJ Edu. “Other things excite me more,” he continued, while insisting he’s still committed to making music.

He’s branching out into producing a documentary with Netflix, which he describes as “one of a kind.”

Davido, whose real name is David Adeleke, is also working on a TV game show. “It’s a lot of fun to watch me do it,” he joked.

It’s going to be “like Fear Factor,” but with girls and chores. The winner gets “a lot of money” and can go on tour with him.

Outside of music, he loves news and politics, he says, but doesn’t see himself making a career change any time soon because everything in the country is so chaotic.

Nigeria is currently facing fuel shortages, university strikes, widespread discontent and widespread insecurity.

“It just gives me a headache,” he said.

“I can’t waste all my years of entertaining, making people happy and then switching [be a] Politicians and my whole career as Davido and everything good that I’ve done for myself is going away because that’s what’s going to happen,” he said.

“A lot of them end up destroying their legacy,” he added, citing high-profile figures entering politics.

Heir is important to him. He wants to be remembered for being a trailblazer, creating opportunities, changing mindsets and changing lives.

In November, Davido gave away 250 million Nigerian naira ($608,000; £450,000) to orphanages in Nigeria after tweeting fans asking them for money if they believed he had made a hit.

He ended up getting more money than he expected, having originally written the tweet as a joke rather than a serious request for fans to send him money.

“I was drunk and I tweeted my bank account number,” he said. But those close to him encouraged him to keep the money to himself. “All night I had people telling me, ‘Yo, it’s your money'”.

But it was his father, billionaire businessman Adedeji Adeleke, who convinced Davido to add his personal cash and donate to the amount.

It took him and his team three months to compile a donation list of nearly 300 orphanages. He plans to donate every year, he said.

Davido started in the industry more than a decade ago and says he took an unconventional path compared to others in his family.

For the Adelekes, the “blueprint” was to go to school and then “go to work for dad.” But he didn’t follow that model.

“Having my mother dying and my father being so busy at work gave me time to find myself,” and that’s when music became his focus. He even “failed” from school because it was such a distraction.

Early in his career his main focus was making it big in the US like Akon, but he eventually realized that the African sound was his passion.

Initially skeptical about his son’s music career, it wasn’t until Davido released his hit Dami Duro in 2012 that his father realized just how far he could go in the industry.

From that moment on, his father’s “billionaire friends” called to convince Mr. Adeleke to let Davido continue the music. They liked his sound.

A decade later, Davido is in London for a sold-out concert at the O2 Arena.

But early in his career he didn’t always feel so welcome in Britain: “I’d rather go home and be treated like royalty than go somewhere else and not be respected.”

But “times are different,” he commented, and the Afrobeats genre is now getting the respect it deserves, with Davido among several stars who have built a global following.

“As the culture grows, the venues get bigger, the songs get more recognition and it’s amazing to watch. It’s become a genre of its own, which is amazing.”

Watch the full interview with DJ Edu for the BBC program This is Africa