Last week, a twelve-year old controversial paternity feud between the Adeleke and Labinjoh families, resurfaced in the media. At its center was Afrobeats star, David Adeleke, popularly known as Davido, and a woman, Ayo Labinjoh. While Davido claimed he had never met the young woman, Ayo and her mother insisted that the product of a one-night stand she allegedly had with the musician resulted in a girl child called Aanu. Davido’s father, a widely respected billionaire, had to take a detour off his wont in a press engagement last week to drill deep down into the paternity feud. The summary of his intervention was that the Labinjohs were gold diggers who wanted to reap from the proceeds of an alleged, (which they vehemently denied) illicit romp.
Superstar Davido is reputed to have had children with at least four confirmed mothers, known in youth lingo as Baby Mamas. These include Sophia Momodu, Amanda, Larissa Yasmin Lorenco, and his wife Chioma Rowland, now his wife. Recent reports also alleged that there were potential claims that would come from Anita Brown and Ivanna Bay. In all, Davido is said to have fathered five children, with Chioma being the mother of his twins and his late son, Ifeanyi.
When I imagine the boundless licence the period of youth gives the youth, I wish I could relive my youth again. In fact, Irish author, Oscar Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, labeled this period in the life of a man as “an age grossly carnal in its pleasures.” At such moments when I crave to be a youth again, I am utterly envious of this category. Apart from the fresh flesh, luscious skin, gentle innocent heap of hairs on the scalp, and energetic limbs, the period of youth also affords the youth some seemingly infinite licence. They can flip their lips with utmost magisteriality, expand the frontiers of their libido as rascally as they can, and dare the world to go to hell. Wilde, while talking about the boundless power of the youth, urges them to savour this licence because, “when your youth goes, your beauty will go with it,” and, “we never get back our youth”. Wilde surveyed the period of youth with such sardonic look and concluded that, it is a moment of “passionate purity.”
In fact, Wilde believed that there is nothing in the world worth having as the period of youth. Age takes all those from us when we begin to grow old. The skin becomes wizened, scalps totally stripped of hairs, face wrinkled, folded brows become comparable to the leaves of moinmoin and feeble legs that can hardly carry you to where you wish are your companion. Said Wilde: “Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly… Ah! Realise your youth while you have it!”
Old age, you are a bore!
Recently, Nigerian singer and songwriter, Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun, popularly known as Wizkid, took another boundless trip that is in sync with his youth demography. The world was riled when, in an online chatter between Seun, son of Afrobeats legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, and fans of Wizkid, the young Wizkid, on his X, wrote, “ok i big pass your papa!!!wetin u one do? Fool at 40!,” taken to mean that he claimed to be bigger than the legendary Fela. Wizkid would seem to have instantly thrown a pebble at a wasp’s verspiary and should be ready for the stings that came therefrom. Immediately after this, the musician began to receive multiple pelts of pebbles of anger from fans who thought the young music star was struck by the spirit of self, arrogance and unbridled audacity. How dare he compare himself to the musical hippopotamus, the erinmi’lokun, Fela!
Many have likened Wizkid’s infelicitous comparison of his talent to Fela’s as heresy. In my piece of August 10, 2025, entitled “KWAM 1, eccentricity and the cult of the Big Man”, I cited the heresy of The Beatles, a famous American Rock music band, widely regarded as the most influential Western popular music ever. It was formed in Liverpool in 1960 with a core lineup of artists like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Lennon had sparked controversy in a 1966 interview with British reporter, Maureen Cleave, when he said The Beatles were even “more popular than Jesus”. He further said, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right … Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
The Lennon comment resulted in a huge backlash and created an uproar which led to wide protests against the band. US religious and social conservatives were outraged. Even the Ku Klux Klan joined the fray. The controversy it sparked was such that The Vatican issued a protest letter. The Beatles’ records were also banned by Spanish and Dutch radio stations and on South Africa’s National Broadcasting Service. When the backlash became too severe, a press conference was organized for Lennon to make a clarification and he said, “If I’d said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it.,” but at further promptings from reporters, he grudgingly said, “If you want me to apologize, if that will make you happy, then okay, I’m sorry.”
The bohemian nature of The Beatles was to come out more later. They provoked a great furore in June 1966 with the cover of their Capitol LP with the title ‘Yesterday and Today.’ The album sleeve had them dressed in a butcher’s overall with raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls splattered on it. They grinned from ear to ear. On a tour of the Philippines the month after this furore, they unintentionally snubbed Imelda Marcos, the nation’s First Lady, who had arranged a breakfast reception for them at the Presidential Palace. Angered, the Marcos organized a nationwide riots against them. Seeing that their lives were hanging precariously in a balance, the Beatles fled the Philippines. In 1970, a legal row ensued in the band leading to its dissolution on December 29, 1974. In 1980, Lennon was murdered and in 2001, George Harrison died of cancer.
To Fela’s fans, Wizkid’s “I big pass your papa” comment is seen in that The Beatles category. The invective they have heaped on Wizkid is so enormous, enough to construct a skyscraper. It may mildly rival the world’s resentment of The Beatles denigrating the signification of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ. Unfortunately for this generation of surviving clan of Fela’s fans who hold doggedly to Fela’s legendary status, and who think Wizkid had committed heresy, garnering overwhelming attacks against Wizkid is like a needle that falls off a leper’s hand for whom picking it up would be a huge task.
This is because, the Fela fan demography has been severely whittled and damaged by age. A large number that still sees the legend in Fela hear of his musical monstrosity merely by words of mouth. Thus, the presence of this disappearing Fela worshipers is negligible on the social media, where the battle is raging. They are very far between there. As such, this leaves a huge demography of youth whose only idolatory, for which they offer no apologies, is no other than the skimpy-statured Wizkid. They are not only formidable players on the information highway battlefield, this community only encountered Fela’s legend as a vamoosing ancient tale. You do not need other psychology, outside of this, to decipher why those attacking Wizkid are a sparse community. To them, Wizkid’s legend is all they know, all they see and the most effervescent thing to behold.
Famous singer Damini Ogulu, widely known as Burna Boy, is also inebriated in his own youthful vagaries. Perceived as brash, vague and driven by an imponderous ego, he is the grandson of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s first band manager, Benson Idonije, who is also a revered music critic and broadcaster. Burna is also a crowd put-off. Recently, a video went viral showing a Burna Boy fan, ostensibly swept off his feet by his musical bravura, jumping on stage to approach the star musician at an event in Lagos. Though security personnel swiftly prevented the fan coming in contact with him, Burna Boy abruptly left the stage, leaving his fans shocked and disappointed, and without any explanation for his gruff. This has become his familiar trait.
Same thing happened at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in November 2025 in Denver, Colorado. At the concert, he ordered security personnel to remove an American fan, Chowtu Jeteni, and her boyfriend, even after purchasing expensive tickets. They had sat on the front row at the concert. Her offence was that she reportedly slept off during the show. Burna Boy then momentarily stopped his performance, claiming that he felt insulted that a fan dared doze off on his show. As the fan and boyfriend were taken off the concert, he yakked, “I’m not doing no more song until you take her home”. Jeteni, on her Instagram page, later described the event as humiliating. She took a trip into the emotional distress she was embroiled in while yet having to attend the show. Said the fan, she was on that day grieving the death of her daughter’s father. She said she had to attend the Burna Boy show to let off burning steam within and brighten her mood. This event led to a significant backlash thereafter for the musician, with fans refusing to go for his shows.
In the above cited piece on KWAM 1, I struggled to put the chunk of asocial behaviour exhibited by musicians and artists in general to eccentricity. I had said, “on stage, wowed and giddy female audiences have reportedly removed their undies and flung them at musicians. Even when they engage in pure outlawry, musicians’ acceptance as daemon by the world is mind-boggling. Discussions on whether society should continue to abet artists’ display of eccentricity as acceptable mode of behaviour or not are rife. The question then is, is eccentricity a victory of aesthetics, artistic expression, extravagant gaining of attention to be different, or simply victory for artistic narcissism?”
How does one describe the atypical manifestations of musicians, many of whom are in their youth: eccentricity, Oscar Wilde’s explanation of the queer manifestations of youth as product of age, or pure outlawry? In the course of writing the biography of Yoruba Apala music legend, Ayinla Omowura, I interviewed his protege, Ayinla Kollington, in his house at Alagbado, Lagos. In the very early 1970s, Kollington, bent on avenging the acerbic attacks on Omowura by his Egba kinsman and contemporary Apala musician colleague, Fatai Olowonyo, had waxed an album he titled Omo Iya Onipako. Asked to reflect on it, the Fuji music great pleaded not to, submitting that, whenever he remembered the phalange of unpleasant words he used against Olowonyo, he always regretted going to such extreme. It will seem that age had tempered the boundless province of word usage that Kollington explored in his youth.
Apparently disregarding Rex Lawson’s evergreen preachment not to take the rich for granted, I think the Labinjohs have turned Lawson’s plea on its head. Being a student of logic, I hold that Davido’s father’s appearance last week and his arguments against the lady who allegedly opened her laps to a celebrity she was meeting for the very first time, conform to the rules of inductive logic. As God created the rich/Ori piki igoin temen, said Lawson, he also created the lowly, Ala wolo ma, igoin derima. Those who queue by the tantrums of that reject and social media perdition on this matter are merely leaving their flanks open for easy shellacking. When someone, whose father, a first class mathematician, scientist and engineer, publicly posted a disclaimer and warned the whole world that this fruit from his tree was cognitively deceased, but foolish you says she is your preferred scientist, I am sorry for you. The Adelekes have enough wealth to take care of another addition to their offspring but science repudiates this obviously orchestrated consanguinity.
Having said this, however, I think that gold-diggers have set in. They capitalize on the liberal, boundless libido of Davido and the undemarcated operational base of his underneath member to hammer their axe. As long as this is the pattern, vultures will continue to feast on his Achilles’ heels.
I think the very idea of Wizkid thinking he is bigger than Fela should be seen from the prism of anger. Seun, Fela’s son, has become a sore in the throat to so many on account of his exuberant irritancy, mostly on the social media. Rather than flaunting the “$120,000” which he claimed he recently collected, “simply because I am Fela’s son,” he should flaunt what he has been able to make of his life as a result of his own name. Wizkid’s father may be a nobody but he has built a name for himself which attracts the world, far more than Seun’s name. The latter’s name is more significant for his irritancy than his musical or societal contributions. Certainly not on account of anything substantial on the bandstand.
Davido, Wizkid, Burna Boy and the like, still salivating the lush of their youths, should adore it while it lasts. I remember this long serenade of youth by Wilde, which is apposite here. He had said, “For there is such a little time that your youth will last – such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month, there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year, the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars…Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”
