The most popular refrains from every Afropop song almost leaps out at you on first listen, the rest of the relevance of such lines or lyrics is sustained via social media captions and pseudo-colloquial expressions. For Davido’s single from earlier in the year, “IF”, the line “30 Billion for the account”, stuck out as the official campaign tagline for the track’s success.

Davido is no stranger to such bawdy near-ridiculous brags about the extent of his wealth and success. In fact, last year, his long-running custody battle with the Momodu family inadvertently led to the call out of media mogul Dele Momodu on his guest verse for Falz’s “Bahd, Baddo, Baddest”.

On the track, he repeats, the words “Mr Dele Na My Boy” twice, stating as matter-of-factly that his status surpasses that of a man who has survived through at least three transformational decades for Nigerian entertainment.

While further debates spurred by that verse have not bothered to actually affirm if Dele Momodu is Davido’s ‘boy’ or not, his latest single, “FIA” features lines that sort of contradicts his popular refrain from “IF”. On “FIA”, a song about the limits of love, Davido sings “You Say If You No Get Money Hide Your Face/ I hide my face”, cornering Small Doctor’s popular expression from smash street-hop hit, “Penalty”.

Now, for a man who claimed to have roughly 30 Billion in his account just a few months ago, this could either mean two things: first, within the context of “FIA”, this could mean, he’s no longer interested in giving his materialistic lover more money, or…that we need to have an intervention on Davido’s spending habits. I mean, we know he didn’t specify the currency of the 30 Billion, but even in the worst economies, 30 Billion anything couldn’t have been such an easy amount to spend.

All banter aside, this lyric was probably a simple oversight on Davido’s part while composing “FIA”, it, however, makes a good case for how poor brand continuity by Nigerian entertainers make it difficult for fans to take them seriously.

In America for example, celebrities are held accountable for their personal philosophies, words and values, because in a sense they are the model idea of post-modern American. In Nigeria, many artists are like Davido; doing the bare minimum and working with ideas that seem compatible for the sake of it. In this peculiar Davido case, someone needs to either get him a financial adviser, or a songwriter that cares about connecting the dots.

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