Diamond Platnumz Spent Years Saying He Owned Wasafi Outright. A 2018 Regulator’s Notice Put Him at 45 Percent.

For years, Diamond Platnumz told interviewers and fans the same thing about the company behind Wasafi FM and Wasafi TV: he owned it, fully and alone. A public notice filed with Tanzania’s communications regulator in November 2018, read directly for this record, says otherwise. It lists three shareholders in the company applying for a Wasafi TV broadcast licence, and Diamond is not the majority one. A woman named Juhayna Zaghalulu Ajmy holds 53 percent. Diamond holds 45. A third name, Ali Khatib Dai, holds the remaining 2.

This is not a story about who owns Diamond Platnumz’s record label. WCB Wasafi, the label that signs and releases Zuchu, Mbosso, Lava Lava and Rayvanny, is a separate matter, and this desk’s own verified record on it stands unchanged: WCB Wasafi is independent and founder-owned by Diamond Platnumz, on the evidence this desk holds. What the 2018 notice describes is the broadcast side of the Wasafi name, the FM and TV licences, and on that side the regulator’s own paperwork put him in a minority position six years before he said anything publicly that matched it.

What the notice establishes

Tanzania’s Communications Regulatory Authority, the TCRA, publishes notices of pending broadcast licence applications and invites objections before deciding them, a step required under Section 8 of the Electronic and Postal Communications Act. In November 2018 it published one covering Wasafi TV’s application, naming three shareholders and their stakes: Juhayna Zaghalulu Ajmy at 53 percent, Nasibu Abdul Juma, the birth name behind the stage name Diamond, at 45 percent, and Ali Khatib Dai at 2 percent. Two separate Tanzanian press reports on consecutive days in late November 2018 covered the same notice and carry the identical split, and this desk read both directly. A third figure publicly linked to Wasafi’s broadcast operations, Clouds Media chief executive Joseph Kusaga, does not appear on the notice at all. Reporting at the time noted this explicitly: despite speculation that Kusaga held a stake, given his wife’s listed 53 percent and his own role running a rival Tanzanian media house, the regulator’s notice names only the three shareholders above.

Tanzania’s own company register was not reachable for this record, so the underlying TCRA filing itself could not be obtained directly; what this record relies on is contemporaneous press coverage of that filing, read in full, not the filing itself. That distinction matters enough to state plainly rather than bury: this is a trade-press account of a regulatory notice, not the notice.

The claim this contradicts took years to crack

Diamond’s public position on Wasafi’s ownership has not been consistent with the 2018 notice for most of the time since. He has described himself in interviews as the owner of the Wasafi name without qualification, and the ownership question became public enough in Tanzania that it generated its own running commentary, including claims from critics that he was a front for someone else entirely. It was only in an interview roughly six years after the TCRA notice that Diamond conceded the point himself, saying a single person cannot be the sole owner of a company under Tanzanian law and that he does not hold full ownership of the Wasafi operation. This desk could not independently fetch the outlet carrying that interview directly; it is included here as reported, with that limitation stated, not as independently confirmed.

What is independently established, from the two directly-read 2018 accounts, is that the minority position existed on paper at the regulator six years before Diamond said anything in public that resembled it.

Three names, one brand, and a company nobody has named in full

No document obtained in this investigation gives the licence-holding company a full registered legal name. Press shorthand calls it “Wasafi Media.” The regulator’s own notice, as reported, refers to it only by the licence it was seeking, for Wasafi TV. Whether that broadcast company, WCB Wasafi the record label, and any other Wasafi-branded entity are the same legal person, related companies under common shareholders, or simply three businesses sharing a marketing name is not resolved by anything this desk read. A UK Companies House search for “Wasafi Media” returns no match; the only UK-registered company with a similar name, Wasafi Limited, was dissolved in 2021 and is a separate, already-documented puzzle tied to phonogram credits on Zuchu’s releases, not to this ownership question. MusicBrainz’s label registry has no separate “Wasafi Media” entry either, only WCB Wasafi itself.

Juhayna Zaghalulu Ajmy, the 53 percent holder, is reported to be married to Joseph Kusaga, the Clouds Media executive whose own station has at times been positioned as a competitor to Wasafi’s broadcast operations and who has at other points been reported to have shown public support for Wasafi events. He is not named as a shareholder on the notice this desk read about. Whether that marriage gave him any informal influence over a company he holds no recorded stake in is not something any document obtained here could answer, and this record does not guess at it.

A discrepancy inside the discrepancy

One further Tanzanian report found in the course of this research gives Diamond’s stake as 43 percent rather than 45, which with the other two figures would total 98 percent rather than 100. This desk could not fetch that report directly after repeated attempts and is not treating its figure as reliable against the two directly-read accounts, which agree with each other and sum correctly. It is noted here because a reader searching the same ground will find it, and a record that omits a contradiction it knows about is not one this desk will publish.

What this record does not establish

It does not establish a current ownership position: nothing found updates the 2018 split, and eight years is a long time for a cap table to sit still, especially around a public figure as prominent as Diamond has become since. It does not establish that the licence-holding entity and WCB Wasafi are connected in any formal corporate sense. It does not establish Joseph Kusaga’s actual relationship to the business beyond speculation the regulator’s own notice declined to confirm. And it does not establish, because the primary filing itself could not be retrieved, that press coverage of the TCRA notice renders it with full accuracy; two independent accounts agreeing with each other is corroboration, not a substitute for the document.

What this means for artists

Artists and partners dealing with a Wasafi-branded entity, on the broadcast side specifically, are not necessarily dealing with Diamond Platnumz as sole decision-maker, whatever the brand’s public face suggests. A majority shareholder named in a regulatory filing, not in any press statement, held the larger stake as of 2018. For a label deal, a distribution arrangement, or a sponsorship tied to Wasafi’s radio or television reach rather than its record label, the person whose name is on the building is not necessarily the person who controls the company behind it, and the two Wasafi businesses, broadcast and label, should not be assumed to be the same thing simply because they share a name and a founder’s public image.