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Claim: Nigerian singer and instrumentalist Seun Kuti claimed in a podcast that “one billion seconds equals 38.5 years.”
Verdict: False. One billion seconds is about 31.7 years (around 31 years and 8 months), not 38.5 years.
Full Text
On September 15, 2025, Glitch Africa Studios released a new episode of The Honest Bunch podcast on YouTube. The show, which has over 508,000 subscribers, featured Nigerian musician and activist Seun Kuti as a guest.
While discussing Nigeria’s economic situation and how people often struggle to grasp the scale of huge numbers, Seun Kuti made a striking comparison at the 53:55-minute mark.
He told the host and audience:
“People don’t understand what a billion is. That’s the phrase, you know. They think one billion…[but] the human brain can still not conceptualise a billion. Our brains are not built for such numbers. A million seconds is 11 days. Do you know how long one billion seconds is? A million seconds is 11 days. One billion seconds is 38.5 years.”
The claim quickly gained traction online. As of Sept. 27, 2025, the podcast episode had been recorded over 138,621 views on YouTube. Social media users reposted clips of the claim on other platforms, sparking conversations and drawing reactions online.
One social media user, @onejoblessboy, with over 301k followers, posted the video of the claim on his X and Facebook pages. The post on X garnered over 300k views with 1.1k retweets, 7.7k likes, 94 comments, and 1.4k bookmarks as of September 17, 2025. On Facebook, the post recorded 2.7k likes, 126 comments, and 298 shares respectively.
Also, some Nigerian Facebook users, such as Abah Adakole Friday, used the claim as a caption while sharing the latest photos of himself on the digital platform. He motivated his followers: “A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 38.5 years. That’s the difference between million and billion. Cherish your time because time is money #SpiritualBusinessMan”
Because of the virality of the claim and its engagement online, DUBAWA set out to verify it.
Verification
DUBAWA computed the number of seconds that make 38.5 years using the Gregorian calendar, the world’s most trusted and accepted civil calendar.
A second is a unit of time defined as 1/86400 of a day, computed by dividing a day into 24 hours, then 60 minutes, and 60 seconds each. Over a year of about 365 days, there are a little more than 31.5 million seconds.
Using Exactlyhowlong to compute the figure, one billion seconds equals 31.71 years. If we use the Gregorian calendar, which accounts for leap years and is more precise, the result is still about 31 years and 8 months.
This shows that Seun Kuti’s figure of 38.5 years is incorrect. His estimate overshoots the actual value by nearly seven years. In perspective, 38.5 years would equal about 1.2 billion seconds, not one billion.
Conclusion
Seun Kuti’s statement that one billion seconds equals 38.5 years is false. Checks show that one billion seconds equals about 31.71 years.
