If there is an artist who gets the most street, bar or even radio airplay, it is definitely Radio & Weasel. That’s from my observation.
What’s baffling tho is that every few months, there is a tiring conversation that always resurfaces on Ugandan music Twitter. It is usually of someone stirring up conversation that Goodlyfe Crew’s Weasel Manizo was just riding on Mowzey Radio’s talent. The quiet one. The background guy. It doesn’t even stop there. The man pulls off a full solo concert, pours himself into it, and still gets picked apart online. Just recently, he posted a screenshot of his UPRS royalty payout, Ugx 285,498 for an entire eighteen months of the Goodlyfe catalogue being played across the country, and captioned it sarcastically as the “best cheque ever.” Instead of that landing as the indictment of a broken royalties system that it clearly was, a section of fans still found a way to turn it into a joke at his expense, mocking him for even bothering to post it. At what point does the criticism stop?
Let me take you back, because I don’t think everyone dragging his name remembers what actually happened. Late January 2018, Radio was caught up in a brawl out in Entebbe and came out of it with severe head and neck injuries. A coma, surgery, over a week of fighting for his life. For a few days there was even hope, with his mother telling reporters he was breathing on his own again. Then on 1st February 2018, Case Hospital confirmed it. Moses Nakintije Ssekibogo, the voice half this country grew up on, was gone. He was 33. At his requiem mass, Weasel could barely stand as he described how the two of them started with nothing and promised each other heaven and earth. That’s not grief you bounce back from on anyone else’s timeline.
And still, instead of grace, a section of fans chose to keep score. Going back through the catalogue arguing who wrote what, who carried which hook, who was the “real” talent, as if Goodlyfe was ever Radio featuring Weasel. It wasn’t. It was two distinct voices building one sound neither of them could’ve built alone. Radio brought that raw, melodic power. Weasel brought the wit and the delivery that made a hook sit in your head for weeks after. You know what a shoe is without its brush? Dusty, worn out fast, rough at the edges. And a brush without a shoe is just bristles sitting in a drawer, doing nothing. That’s Goodlyfe. There’s no “Bread & Butter,” Juicy Juicy”, no “Nyumbani,” none of those timeless bangers, if it had been a one man show wearing two names.
It’s really a chicken and egg trap. Which one made Goodlyfe, Goodlyfe? Neither, alone. Both, together. That’s the whole premise of a duo. Chemistry doesn’t split into neat halves you can rank on a spreadsheet, yet every anniversary, every time an old song trends, out come the same takes about Weasel coasting. Now it’s spilled into how his solo work gets received too, compared endlessly to a version of him that had someone standing beside him who’s no longer here to share the load. Even that UPRS post got twisted the same way, as though a man pointing out that eighteen months of Goodlyfe’s music, songs that still soundtrack weddings and boda rides across this country, earned him less than a boda rider makes in a good week, was somehow him “begging” or “seeking attention.” He was frustrated enough about it to formally instruct UPRS to pull the Goodlyfe catalogue from their system altogether over what he called mismanagement and lack of transparency. That’s not the behavior of someone chasing sympathy. That’s a man defending work he and his late partner built with their bare hands, and still getting mocked for it.
What people forget is that grief doesn’t come with a highlight reel. It doesn’t always look like tears on camera. Sometimes it looks like a man who goes quiet for a season, who takes his time getting back to the studio, who doesn’t have the sharpest comeback when a mic is shoved in his face mid relitigation of his own legacy. That’s not proof he lacked talent. That’s a person carrying something heavy while we sit comfortably grading his output, his royalty statements, even his frustration.
We’re too quick to save our kindness for tributes, waiting until someone’s being laid to rest before remembering every good thing they did for us. It’d be sad if Weasel only got his flowers in full once he’s no longer here to smell them, the same way we finally gave Radio his. So cut Weasel some slack. Let him exist as an artist in his own right, not a footnote to someone he loved and lost, and not a punchline every time he speaks up about being shortchanged. Let Goodlyfe’s legacy stay shared, not divided up like leftovers, with one man getting the bigger plate because he’s not here to argue his own case. They were the shoe and the brush. Stop asking which one mattered more, and just appreciate that together, they walked further than either of them could have alone.
Rest well, Radio. And Weasel, stay “Gumite”. We see you. We love you, All of you.