The most telling part of Davido’s new interview with The FADER is not what he said about Wizkid, but what he said about himself. At 33, the Afrobeats superstar is openly reframing what competition even means to him now, and it sounds like a genuine shift rather than a PR move.
“I’m 33 years old, I think I’m still competing,” he told The FADER, “My head is just at making good music; whoever I make it with doesn’t matter to me. Division right now would make us weaker.” That last line is the one that will get people talking, because it directly addresses the years of fan wars and online beef that have followed both him and Wizkid across their careers.
For a long time, comparisons between Davido and Wizkid were basically a sport for Afrobeats fans online. The two artists rarely addressed it directly, which only kept the debate alive and louder with every new release either of them dropped.
Davido’s framing here is interesting because he is not dismissing the competitive spirit entirely. He is saying it still exists, but that it no longer needs to come at the cost of the genre’s collective momentum, which is a pretty different energy from where things stood a decade ago.
He pointed to how much the Afrobeats landscape has actually changed as the reason behind that shift. When he was coming up, he has spoken before about how few doors were open for African artists globally, and how limited the spotlight felt. Now, the genre has its own festivals, award shows, and serious streaming infrastructure, meaning there is genuinely more room for multiple artists to win at the same time.
That context matters because it reframes the old rivalry as something that made more sense when resources felt scarce. The argument Davido is making is essentially that the pie is bigger now, so fighting over slices is a waste of energy that could go into the music itself.
Not everyone will take the comments at face value, of course. Fan communities on both sides have long memories, and a single interview rarely undoes years of tribal loyalty built around two of the genre’s biggest names. Some will read this as Davido being diplomatic ahead of a new album cycle rather than any real change in how things stand between the two camps.
That album is Oriadé, his sixth studio project, released on July 31. It leans into themes of love, family, and legacy, and features both established names and newer artists, which lines up with the more collaborative, less combative image he is projecting right now.
The timing is worth paying attention to. Davido is in full promotion mode, and positioning himself as someone focused on unity over rivalry is a smart way to frame a record that is clearly meant to feel personal and expansive rather than competitive. Whether Wizkid has anything to say about any of this is a whole other conversation waiting to happen.
