“While I am often praised for discovering and nurturing superstars, I can confidently say the most genius thing I’ve ever done in my life was recognising Tega’s passion and resilience”. These were Don Jazzy’s words when Tega Oghenejobo was promoted to President & COO of Mavin.
There is a version of the Mavin story that almost everyone knows. It goes like this: Don Jazzy, born Michael Collins Ajereh in Lagos, moves to London in his early twenties, learns music production while working security at McDonald’s, returns home with an ear for what Nigerian pop could become, builds Mo’ Hits Records from scratch, splits with D’banj, and from the wreckage builds something even bigger. It is a genuinely remarkable story. It is also only one half.
The other half begins with a university student in Port Harcourt, studying Computer Science, while his older cousin was ruling Nigerian music in Lagos. His name is Tega Oghenejobo. And in March 2026, when Billboard published its Global Power Players list (the annual census of executives shaping the international music industry from outside the United States), his name appeared alongside Don Jazzy’s. They were the only African label leadership team on it, listed beside executives from Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner.
Getting there took twenty-two years, a street team in Delta State, a broken label, a talent development academy, and one private equity deal that most people didn’t fully understand when it happened. It is a story about what it actually takes to build an institution, something that survives the departure of its biggest artists, attracts institutional capital, and eventually gets acquired by the largest music company on earth for somewhere between $125 and $200 million, shepherded by a pair of cousins.
This is the timeline of Tega & Don Jazzy’s rise to the top.
London, Mo’ Hits, and a Front-Row Seat
Before any of this, there was Don Jazzy in London, learning his craft under Emeka Infiniti at O-Town Records, connecting with D’banj through the Backbone Music scene, working the McDonald’s night shift between sessions. He came back to Nigeria in 2004 with two things: a signature production sound and a business partner. Mo’ Hits Records launched that September.
What followed was the defining label era of a generation. They had a heavyweight roster: D’banj, Wande Coal, Dr SID, D’Prince, and KaySwitch. Wande Coal’s Mushin 2 Mo’Hits, released in 2009, is still cited as one of the finest Nigerian pop albums ever made. In 2011, Don Jazzy produced “Lift Off” for Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne, the first time a Nigerian producer’s name appeared at that scale on an American rap record.
While this was happening, Tega joined the Mo’ Hits street team in Delta State, ensuring the label’s music dominated bars, restaurants, and popular spots across his home region. It was unglamorous grunt work. It was also exactly the kind of work that teaches you how industries actually function, as opposed to how they appear from the outside.
Then, in March 2012, it ended. Don Jazzy and D’banj publicly split, citing artistic differences and dissolving Mo’ Hits. Don Jazzy later admitted the collapse left him genuinely uncertain whether to continue in music, but ultimately, he chose to start over. On May 7, 2012, he announced Mavin Records.
Building the Machine
Tega joined Mavin from day one, relocating fully to Lagos. His first formal role was road manager for D’Prince, one of the Mo’ Hits alumni who made the transition to the new label. But the scope of his responsibilities expanded almost immediately. Don Jazzy needed someone to help build an entirely new enterprise from scratch, and Tega, by this point, understood enough about the industry’s mechanics to be useful beyond logistics.
He moved into the role of Brand and Marketing Executive. And the first question he forced himself and the label to answer was a strategic one: what are we, exactly? Mavin couldn’t be Mo’ Hits with a new name. “I asked myself: what’s our unique selling point?” he later told OkayAfrica. The answer he developed shaped everything that followed: a label defined not by a single superstar or a single sound, but by the consistency of its output and the systems that produced it.
The first public results were impressive enough. Solar Plexus, Mavin’s debut compilation, introduced Tiwa Savage, Dr SID, and D’Prince under the new banner in 2012. The label won the MTV Africa Music Award for Best Record Label in 2013 and again in 2014. “Dorobucci”, the group record released in 2014, briefly became Nigeria’s unofficial soundtrack.
But Tega was doing something that wouldn’t fully reveal its value for years. After five years as Brand and Marketing Executive, he had begun heading the label’s Partnerships Department, pitching Mavin as a commercial partner to telecoms companies, banks, and FMCG brands. These were not the kinds of deals that appear in entertainment journalism. They were the financial scaffolding that gave a creative business room to take risks.
More importantly, he designed what became known as the Mavin Artist Academy: a development programme that kept newly signed artists away from public scrutiny for a minimum of eighteen months before any release. The logic was simple and hard-won. Nigerian music had a recurring failure mode: talented artists launched too early, before their craft had cohered, burning through public goodwill before they were ready to sustain it. The Academy was a direct structural response to that problem. A system for making artists ready before the world saw them, not after.
The artists who would eventually prove the system’s value, namely Rema and Ayra Starr, hadn’t yet been discovered. But the infrastructure that would shape them was already being built.
The First Outside Money
In 2018, Don Jazzy promoted Tega to Chief Operating Officer. The title formalised what had long been operationally true: while Don Jazzy focused on discovering and developing artists, the thing he does better than almost anyone alive in this region, Tega was running the business. Setting strategic direction. Building systems. Hiring towards international scale. Holding the floor steady beneath the creative work so that the creative work could afford to be ambitious.
Colleagues would describe him with two words in particular: growth and execution. “Tega’s always restless,” a digital intern at the label told OkayAfrica. The restlessness had a direction.
In January 2019, Mavin announced a multimillion-dollar equity investment from Kupanda Holdings, a joint venture involving TPG Growth, the private equity firm with investments in Spotify, Uber, and Airbnb. Analysis of UK Companies House filings placed the post-money valuation at approximately $9.5 million, with the investors acquiring a stake of around 46% in the newly formed holding entity, Mavin Global Holdings Ltd. It was the first major institutional equity investment in a Nigerian music company.
The deal is worth pausing on, because it is easy to misread what made it possible. Yes, Mavin had extraordinary music, but so had Mo’ Hits, which never attracted institutional capital. What was different in 2019 was that Mavin had become the kind of organisation that institutional investors could engage with: documented processes, formalised structures, a coherent growth strategy they could examine and stress-test. That readiness was Tega’s contribution.
Proof of Concept
Two artists defined the years that followed, and both were products of the system Tega had built.
Rema was discovered in 2019 via an Instagram freestyle video. He spent time in the Academy before his debut EP. Ayra Starr was signed in 2020 after Don Jazzy found videos of her covering songs online. She, too, was admitted to the Academy before any public release.
The results were astounding. Rema’s “Calm Down” remix with Selena Gomez became the first Afrobeats track to surpass one billion Spotify streams, it peaked at number three on the US Billboard Hot 100. Ayra Starr’s “Rush” earned a Grammy nomination for Best African Music Performance.
These were not accidents. They were the downstream output of a talent pipeline that had been designed, specifically and deliberately, to prevent gifted artists from being launched before they were ready. UMG’s chairman, Sir Lucian Grainge, would later describe Mavin’s leadership as “great artists, great entrepreneurs, great people”, precisely the criteria his company uses when identifying acquisition targets.
Universal, and What Comes After
In February 2024, UMG announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Mavin Global. Reports placed the transaction value between $125 million and $200 million, a roughly fifteen to twenty times return on the $9.5 million valuation from five years earlier. Don Jazzy and Tega were confirmed to continue leading the company with full creative and operational autonomy, a detail UMG chose to emphasise publicly, because it understood that Mavin’s value was inseparable from the people running it.
That October, Don Jazzy announced Tega’s promotion to President and COO of Mavin Global. In an Instagram post, Don Jazzy wrote the words that opened this piece. That was a founder publicly and deliberately saying that his best act of talent identification was not an artist. It was an operator. In an industry that almost never surfaces the business side of creative success, that statement was unusual.
Power Players
When the 2026 Billboard Global Power Players list was published, Don Jazzy and Tega Oghenejobo appeared on it, recognised for their leadership of Mavin Records and their influence on the international music business outside the United States, the only African label leadership team included.
The recognition was, in one sense, a validation of what had already happened: the acquisition, the billion-stream record, the Grammy nomination, twelve years of institutional construction. In another sense, it was something slightly more significant, a signal from the global industry that Mavin had not merely benefited from Afrobeats going global, but had actively shaped the conditions under which it did.
The Mavin story has been told, correctly, as a story about Don Jazzy’s creative genius. What this longer timeline adds is the other half: that none of those creative instincts would have reached their full commercial scale without someone spending twelve years building the infrastructure capable of holding and multiplying them.
Tega Oghenejobo joined Mavin in 2012 as a founding-era brand executive. Five years in that role. Then six more as COO. Then, President in 2024. Twelve years at the same company, building the same institution, from the bottom of its executive structure to the top. It is, as Tega once put it, a long game. He knew that from the start.
Leave a Reply