Goodlyfe Magic Limited, the Kampala company that holds the Radio & Weasel catalogue, fired Uganda’s only performing-rights collecting society on 7 July 2026. The letter, signed by surviving member Douglas “Weasel Manizo” Mayanja as the company’s director, terminated the Uganda Performing Right Society’s mandate to license, collect royalties, administer and represent the catalogue, accused it of “gross mismanagement, lack of transparency, and suspected fraud,” and gave it 14 days to produce an audit, a full statement of accounts and any money owed. Four months on, no source checked reports UPRS meeting that deadline, responding to the termination itself, or either side taking it further.
What actually changed hands: nothing, yet#
This is not a sale of masters and it is not a label signing. UPRS never owned a note of the Radio & Weasel recordings or compositions. Under Uganda’s 1985 collecting-society framework, it held a licensing mandate: the right to license the catalogue’s public performance and broadcast use to bars, radio stations and event organisers, collect the resulting royalties, and pass them on to the rights holder. Goodlyfe Magic Limited’s letter revokes that mandate and nothing else. Ownership of the underlying recordings is not in dispute, and no source checked suggests it ever was. What is in dispute is who gets to collect money on those recordings’ behalf, and how much of it the rights holder has actually seen.
The number that started it#
The trigger was small enough to be almost comic: a mobile-money receipt for UGX 285,498, which Weasel captioned “UPRS best cheque ever” when he posted it. At roughly 3,700 Uganda shillings to the US dollar, that is about $77. Sources disagree on what period the figure covers. New Vision, Uganda’s state-owned paper of record, quotes UPRS board chairman and president, identified only as “Yoyo,” saying it represents Weasel’s accumulated royalties over the past 12 months. AllAfrica’s syndication of a Nile Post report, Matooke Republic and Patrol Uganda all put the period at 18 months instead. Neither figure is disclosed with supporting documentation in any source this desk could locate, and this record does not resolve which is correct.
The timing made the number sting more. Days before Weasel posted his receipt, UPRS had announced a society-wide distribution of roughly Shs200 million (about $54,000) to rights holders. Against that backdrop, a catalogue as widely played as Radio & Weasel’s clearing well under a hundred dollars was always going to draw attention, and it did: Eddy Kenzo, president of the Uganda National Musicians Federation, said publicly that “musicians need to know where this money came from and how it was collected,” and separately that he personally received nothing from UPRS over the same period. Two other artists, Chozen Blood and Lydia Jazmine, independently disclosed their own small payouts, Shs60,000 and UGX 1.4 million respectively, around the same week, suggesting Goodlyfe’s complaint was not an isolated grievance about one catalogue but a visible symptom of a wider distribution dispute.
What UPRS actually said, and what it did not#
UPRS’s only identified public response addresses the money, not the mandate it was fired from. Per New Vision, chairman Yoyo said the royalties collected from Radio & Weasel’s catalogue are not Weasel’s alone to receive: they are shared with the estate of the late Moses “Mowzey Radio” Ssekibogo, who died in 2018, and with producer Washington, who worked on many of the songs. He added that some of the catalogue had been licensed or acquired by distributors, naming one, Kasiwulira, and said Weasel’s own registration with the society appears to be outdated, which caps how much of his repertoire can be matched to usage data and paid out. “He needs to update it so that he can be paid for more of his works,” Yoyo is quoted as saying.
That is a defence of the arithmetic behind one disputed cheque. It is not a response to a formal termination notice that accuses the society of fraud, demands an audit within a fixed deadline, and threatens litigation for breach of fiduciary duty if the society keeps administering a catalogue it has been told to stop administering. No source checked for this record shows UPRS acknowledging the letter at all, let alone answering its specific demands: a verified audit report, a comprehensive statement of accounts, remittance of outstanding payments, and copies of the underlying administration records, usage reports, licensing agreements, broadcast logs and cue sheets that would let Goodlyfe check the society’s numbers against its own.
Why a $77 cheque produced a fraud allegation#
The gap between the size of the payout and the size of the response is the real story here. Collecting societies run on a structural information asymmetry: they aggregate usage data from thousands of broadcast and public-performance points that an individual rights holder has no way to independently audit, then distribute royalties according to rules and repertoire data that are, in UPRS’s own telling, dependent on registration accuracy that an artist might not know is out of date. When that system produces a payout an artist regards as implausible for a catalogue as widely played as Radio & Weasel’s, the only real recourse available to the rights holder is exactly what Goodlyfe Magic Limited used: demand the underlying records, or walk.
Whether UPRS’s defence holds up, that the money is genuinely split three ways and the shortfall is a registration problem Goodlyfe can fix, cannot be checked from outside. No audited distribution statement, no royalty schedule and no registration record for the catalogue has been made public by either side. That absence is itself notable: a regulator-recognised, CISAC-affiliated collecting society with a 1985 founding date and sole legal authority to license public performance in Uganda has, on the public record, been accused in writing of suspected fraud by a rights holder representing a catalogue with national reach, and has not been reported to have produced the documents its own accuser asked for.
What this means for artists#
For any Ugandan artist or estate relying on UPRS, three things follow directly from this dispute, independent of how it resolves. First, registration accuracy is not a formality: by UPRS’s own stated defence, an outdated catalogue registration is a live reason a collecting society can legally pay out less than a rights holder expects, which makes keeping that registration current a rights holder’s own responsibility, not the society’s. Second, a CMO mandate is revocable by the rights holder, as Goodlyfe Magic Limited has just demonstrated, but revoking it does not retroactively produce the audit trail needed to check what was collected before the revocation; that has to be demanded separately, in writing, with a deadline, which is exactly the template this letter provides. Third, and most broadly, the dispute is a reminder that a collecting society’s mandate covers performance and broadcast royalties only. It has no bearing on who owns the masters or the compositions underneath them, and conflating the two, mistaking a dispute over royalty administration for a dispute over rights ownership, is the single most common error an outsider can make reading a story like this one.
Afrobeats Wire asked what checks exist on the figures in this piece, and the honest caveat is that it is reported, not independently verified: no audited statement from either side has been published, and Uganda’s company registry could not be used to confirm Goodlyfe Magic Limited’s incorporation details beyond Douglas Mayanja’s own signature on the letter. What is independently confirmable is the sequence itself: a specific royalty figure, a specific termination date, a specific 14-day deadline, and, as of this writing, specific silence from the party asked to meet it.
