Davido will play the main bowl of UJ Esuene Stadium in Calabar on December 29, his date with this year’s Calabar Carnival and Festival. It comes at the tail of his three nights at the National Theatre in Lagos, and it carries the December built around his fifteen years in music to a stadium where he sang “Skelewu” the year it came out.
Carnival Calabar runs its main week from December 26 to 30 this year. The parades take a 12-kilometre route through the city that finishes at the stadium, and the official timetable gives December 29 to the Bikers Carnival, when the power bikes take that same route. Davido’s show is the music waiting at the end of that road.
He has had this room before. On the Saturday after Christmas in 2013, the carnival’s “Calabar Rocks” concert packed the 16,000-capacity bowl with 2face, Naeto C, Sound Sultan, Iyanya and Davido, barely two years after “Dami Duro.” “Skelewu” was a few months old and Omo Baba Olowo was still his only album, and reports from that night have the crowd yelling his songs back at him before Iyanya, the Cross River act on the bill, took the home welcome with “Kukere.” That night sits near the very start of the fifteen years the Lagos residency is meant to celebrate.
He was back on the same ground in December 2017, the year of “IF,” “Fall” and “FIA,” sharing the Black Music Festival bill with Flavour, Iyanya and Styl-Plus.
Calabar had no night on his last run at home. The 5ive Alive tour opened next door at Godswill Akpabio International Stadium in Uyo in October 2025, then went through Yola, Enugu, Ibadan and Abuja before ending in Lagos on Christmas Day, so for fans in Cross River the nearest stop was across the state line.
Nobody has posted a lineup, a ticket link or a promoter yet. The bikers will have the route that day. The bowl at the end of it is booked for him.