Wilson Radido has had at least three careers inside one music career.
First there was gospel Willy Paul, the teenager from Mathare who walked for hours to attend an Eko Dydda concert and ended up recording hits with Gloria Muliro. Then secular Willy Paul arrived in 2018, split Kenya down the middle, and proceeded to chart more consistently than he ever had in gospel. Now there is post-gospel, post-controversy Pozze, releasing Afrobeat singles and hinting at returning to church while doing neither convincingly.
The best Willy Paul songs come from all three chapters, and that is what makes ranking them interesting. That’s what makes ranking them interesting.
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10 Willy Paul — Sitolia (feat. Gloria Muliro)
Year: 2014
The song that started everything and then nearly destroyed him. Sitolia was co-written from Willy Paul's own life and recorded with his mentor Gloria Muliro after the two connected through J. Blessing. It went everywhere. Then the copyright dispute started. Muliro reportedly held exclusive rights, and he felt he wasn't seeing fair earnings from his own story. They eventually resolved it and recorded "Kitanzi" together, but Sitolia remains the most loaded entry on this Willy Paul songs list. You cannot separate it from everything that followed.
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9 Willy Paul — Kamati Ya Roho Chafu (feat. Bien)
Year: 2019
The most surprising collaboration in his Willy Paul songs catalogue. Bien from Sauti Sol and Willy Paul on the same track seemed like an unlikely pairing, and the song leaned into that energy. Kamati Ya Roho Chafu (roughly: Committee of the Dirty-Hearted) is a mid-tempo banger with a hook that sounds like a church rebuke wrapped in a club beat. It found an audience that cut across the gospel and secular divide, and it showed that Willy Paul could hold his own with one of Kenya's most musically accomplished artists.
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8 Willy Paul — Tam Tam (feat. Size 8)
Year: 2014
One of the Willy Paul songs that won him everything at once. According to Wikipedia, Tam Tam swept the Mdundo Awards: Most Downloaded Gospel Artist, Most Downloaded Male Single, Collabo of the Year, Video of the Year, Song of the Year, and Male Artist of the Year. All from one track. It is a gospel party song, which sounds like a contradiction but works completely. Size 8's energy matched his, the production was punchy, and the song found an audience in churches and on radio simultaneously.
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7 Willy Paul — Hallelujah (feat. Nandy)
Year: 2019
The second Nandy collaboration in the Willy Paul songs catalogue, and arguably the better one musically. Hallelujah spent 83 weeks on Popnable charts at number one. Where Njiwa was a love song built for radio, Hallelujah was a devotional track that somehow worked in both sacred and secular spaces. Nandy's vocals elevated it beyond what he could have done alone. It remains one of the Willy Paul songs that his gospel-era fans and his secular-era fans can both agree on.
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6 Willy Paul — Mmmh (feat. Rayvanny)
Year: 2019
Six million YouTube views. Eighty-seven weeks on Popnable charts at number one. Mmmh is the track that connected Willy Paul most effectively to the Tanzanian Bongo market, and Rayvanny's presence made it feel like an East African record rather than just a Kenyan one. The lyrics are playful Swahili devotion, the production sits somewhere between Bongo Flava and Afropop, and the hook is exactly as simple and sticky as the title suggests. One of those Willy Paul songs that sounds inevitable in hindsight but nobody else was making at the time.
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5 Willy Paul — Jigi Jigi
Year: 2015
The most controversial entry on this list, and the most culturally significant.
Jigi Jigi was the moment Willy Paul stopped being a gospel artist and became something Kenya hadn't quite seen before. A gospel artist releasing a track that peaked at number one on Mdundo Weekly Top 100, the Top 40 Singles Chart, and the Local Top 20 Hits simultaneously. Ringtone famously called it the worst thing he had ever heard from Willy Paul. The rest of Kenya played it on repeat. The backlash from the Christian community was loud and sustained. The numbers were louder.
Seven million YouTube views. That's not a controversy. That's a hit.
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4 Willy Paul — Kuu Kuu (feat. JZyNo)
Year: 2024
The most recent entry on this ranked Willy Paul songs list and arguably his best production in a decade. Kuu Kuu, featuring Liberian artist JZyNo from his Beyond Gifted album, reached 10 million YouTube views and ranked sixth among the most-watched Kenyan music videos of 2024. It has 890,000 streams on Spotify. The Afrobeat production is tighter than anything in his earlier catalogue, JZyNo's verse adds genuine international texture, and the song proved that Willy Paul at 30 was a more complete artist than Willy Paul at 20. Some artists peak early. He has been getting better.
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3 Willy Paul — Njiwa (feat. Nandy)
Year: 2018
Thirteen million YouTube views. One hundred and twenty-two weeks on Popnable charts at number one. Njiwa is the biggest Willy Paul song by almost every measurable metric, and it earned that position legitimately.
The collaboration with Tanzania's Nandy gave it regional reach before most Kenyan artists were thinking that way. The lyrics navigate a space between gospel and secular that Willy Paul has always inhabited more naturally than his critics admit — a njiwa (dove) as both a symbol of love and the Holy Spirit. Kenyan social media spent months debating whether it was gospel or secular. The answer is that it's a great song, and that question doesn't matter.
Njiwa is the Willy Paul song that will be played at Kenyan weddings in 2036.
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2 Willy Paul — I Do (feat. Alaine)
Year: 2017
The wedding song. Full stop.
I Do, featuring Jamaican singer Alaine, was played at so many Kenyan weddings in 2017 and 2018 that it became inseparable from the institution itself. The Jamaican connection made it feel international without losing its warmth. Alaine's voice over his production created a chemistry that neither of them had replicated individually. It went viral when a video emerged of the two of them in wedding outfits. It turned out to be a promotional shoot for the song, not an actual wedding, but Kenya had already decided the narrative.
I Do is the second-best Willy Paul song in terms of cultural footprint. The only reason it sits at number two is the song directly below it, which came first and cost more to make.
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1 Willy Paul — Kitanzi (feat. Gloria Muliro)
Year: 2014
The reconciliation song. After the copyright dispute over Sitolia nearly destroyed the relationship between Willy Paul and his mentor Gloria Muliro, they chose to make music together again instead of letting the falling out define them. Kitanzi was the result.
That context is everything. A reconciliation song recorded by two people who had genuinely hurt each other sounds different from any other collaboration. The warmth in it is earned. Muliro's vocals carry the weight of someone who chose forgiveness over resentment, and his performance matches that register in a way he has rarely managed before or since.
Sitolia launched his career. Kitanzi proved something harder: that he could build and maintain a relationship with someone he had wronged. For an artist whose career has been marked by disputes, exits, and broken professional ties, that is not a small thing.
It is the best Willy Paul song because it is the most human one.
Honourable Mentions — More Willy Paul Songs Worth Your Time
- Kitanzi (feat. Gloria Muliro) — the reconciliation song, released after the copyright fallout; sweeter because of what preceded it
- Bora Uhai (feat. Khaligraph Jones) — an unlikely gospel-rap pairing that holds up well
- Nobody (feat. Yemi Alade) — Nigerian connection, her vocals elevated it
- Mapenzi Yananiua (2026) — his most recent single at time of writing; slow, aching, suggests the gospel comeback is still not here yet
- Uuh Mama (feat. Meddy) — 2019 Rwandan collab, criminally underrated in his catalogue
What Makes a Great Willy Paul Song?
The Willy Paul songs that have lasted share one quality: they occupy territory nobody else was occupying at the time.
Sitolia in 2014 was a gospel song with personal stakes nobody else in gospel Kenya was putting on record. Jigi Jigi in 2015 was a gospel artist making a secular banger before that was a acceptable. Njiwa in 2018 was an East African record when most Kenyan artists were still thinking locally. I Do was a Jamaican-Kenyan wedding anthem that nobody knew they needed.
His weakest Willy Paul songs are the ones that sound like what everyone else was doing. His best are the ones that sound like nobody else.
→ Khaligraph Jones Songs — Ranked
Which Willy Paul song is your all-time favourite? And do you think he should go back to gospel? Drop it in the comments
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