Rostam Azizi’s NMG Takeover Sends Shares Soaring — and Raises Big Questions About East Africa’s Media Future

In two trading days, the Nation Media Group (NMG) share price did something it had not managed in years: it surged. By Thursday, March 13, 2026, the stock had climbed 28.3 percent from its pre-announcement level of Ksh13.25 per share, hitting a two-year high of Ksh17 — a total market valuation of Ksh3.24 billion ($25.06 million). The catalyst was a deal that had been decades in the making and that few in the market saw coming: the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) was selling its controlling stake in one of Africa’s most storied media houses, and the buyer was a Tanzanian billionaire with a track record built on precisely this kind of bet.

The announcement — served on NMG’s board on March 10, 2026 — marks the end of a 66-year association between AKFED and NMG, and the beginning of a new chapter whose contours are still taking shape. For investors on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the early verdict is clear. For journalists, media analysts, and the millions of East Africans who rely on NMG’s titles, the questions are more complicated.

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The Deal: Structure, Scale, and Speed

The transaction is straightforward in its mechanics, if consequential in its implications. AKFED, the Swiss-based international development institution, held its NMG stake not directly but through an investment vehicle called NPRT Holdings Africa Limited — a Kenyan private limited liability company that owns 92,618,177 ordinary shares in NMG, representing 54.08 percent of the company’s total issued share capital. Under the agreement, Taarifa Ltd — Azizi’s acquisition vehicle and an affiliate of his Taifa Group — is purchasing 100 percent of NPRT from AKFED, rather than buying NMG shares directly. The transfer of the holding company achieves the same result: Azizi becomes the controlling shareholder of NMG.

The transaction documents were signed at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi on March 10, 2026, with Azizi and Sultan Ali Allana, director of AKFED, putting their names to the agreement. No financial terms were publicly disclosed. Based on NMG’s closing price of Ksh13.25 on the day of signing, the stake carried an implied market value of approximately Ksh1.23 billion — though the agreed transaction price may differ from that figure.

The deal is expected to close within three to four months, subject to regulatory approvals from Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority and the Communications Authority. Taarifa has confirmed it does not intend to make a mandatory offer for the remaining NMG shares held by minority investors, nor does it plan to delist the company from the Nairobi Securities Exchange or from any of the three other exchanges where NMG is cross-listed — the Uganda Securities Exchange, the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange, and the Rwanda Stock Exchange.

The Buyer: Who Is Rostam Azizi?

Few figures in East African business carry the range of Rostam Abdulrasul Azizi. According to The Chanzo, Forbes designated him the first Tanzanian dollar billionaire in 2013, with a net worth then exceeding $10 billion, and the Henley and Partners Africa Wealth Report 2022 identified him as the only dollar billionaire in East Africa. He has described himself as a self-made businessman, economist, and former politician whose investment empire spans telecoms, energy, mining, agriculture, real estate, port facilities, and construction — as well as media.

His media credentials are, notably, closely tied to the very institution he is now acquiring. In 1999, Azizi co-founded Mwananchi Communications Limited, which established The Citizen, Mwananchi, and Mwanaspoti — three of Tanzania’s most prominent publications. He exited that investment in 2006 when NMG acquired Mwananchi Communications, giving NMG its Tanzanian newspaper footprint. What is striking about the current transaction is that the properties Azizi helped build are already part of the company he is now taking over. His acquisition of NMG therefore represents not just a new relationship with the institution but a return to properties he helped create.

Following his exit from Mwananchi, Azizi continued building in Tanzanian media. He acquired New Habari (2006) Limited and became a principal investor in Africa Media Group between 2005 and 2019, through which he held interests in Channel Ten, DTV, CTN, Classic FM, and Magic FM. He currently holds interests in Habari Corporation Limited, a media house operating in Tanzania today. Outside media, he was among the founder shareholders of Vodacom Tanzania in 1999, before exiting that investment in 2019 and participating in a consortium that took over Tigo Tanzania — now rebranded as Yas.

Addressing a press conference at the Serena Hotel on March 11, Azizi sought to frame the acquisition in regional and strategic terms. He dismissed suggestions that the deal was motivated by political relationships — specifically addressing speculation about ties to President William Ruto — noting that his relationships extend across Kenya’s political landscape, including former President Uhuru Kenyatta. He also pushed back on any framing of the deal as a Kenya-Tanzania rivalry: “Kenya and Tanzania are not rivals but two countries that complement each other. We are strong together.”

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The Seller: Why AKFED Is Walking Away

For AKFED, the exit is the product of a portfolio review rather than a loss of faith in NMG specifically. As the investment arm of the Aga Khan Development Network, AKFED’s core mandate has focused on financial services, industrials, infrastructure, and hospitality. NMG has long been its sole media investment globally — an outlier in a portfolio otherwise defined by different sectors. After a strategic review, the organisation concluded that concentrating resources on its core areas of competence was the appropriate path.

The AKFED-NMG story begins in 1959, when His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV acquired Taifa Leo, a Kiswahili weekly newspaper, as Kenya moved toward independence. The vision was explicit: to provide the newly independent nation with a free, independent press capable of supporting democratic governance. From that single publication grew what is now a pan-East African media operation spanning more than 30 brands across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda — including the Daily Nation, The EastAfrican, Business Daily, NTV Kenya, and the Daily Monitor in Uganda. NMG became the first African media company to list on a stock exchange when it joined the Nairobi Securities Exchange in 1973.

In its joint statement with Taarifa, AKFED described the sale as enabling NMG to “expand its impact through further investment in its digital transformation.” The Aga Khan Development Network has indicated it will maintain its commitment to journalistic standards through the Graduate School of Media and Communications at Aga Khan University, which it described as focused on equipping future journalists with the skills and integrity essential to a free press.

NMG’s Financial Reality and the Digital Imperative

The deal arrives at a moment of real financial pressure for NMG. According to reporting by CEO East Africa, NMG posted a net loss of Ksh254.4 million in 2024, following a Ksh205.7 million loss in 2023. Group turnover fell 12.5 percent in 2024 to Ksh6.23 billion. The board suspended dividend payouts for 2024 to conserve cash for digital investment. The company has been through multiple rounds of workforce reduction — in 2016, 2020, 2021, 2024, and again in late 2025 — and in early 2026 it announced the closure of its Mombasa regional newsroom, transitioning staff to remote working to reduce overheads. The Kenyan government’s failure to settle advertising debts — estimated at Ksh800 million owed to NMG alone as of 2024 — has compounded the challenge.

These pressures are not unique to NMG. They reflect a structural shift in the global media industry: print advertising has collapsed, digital consumption has fragmented audiences, and the platforms that aggregate attention — Google, Meta, and global streaming services — do not share revenue at scale with the publishers whose content they surface.

NMG’s response has been a strategy it has described internally as the North Star approach: transforming into Africa’s most trusted and innovative content platform, developed in partnership with FT Strategies. The goal is to shift from a print-centric model — where, as recently as 2023, digital revenue accounted for only 5 percent of total group income, against more than 80 percent from legacy print products — to one in which digital generates at least 50 percent of revenue by 2027. The group has pursued newsroom integration, restructured editorial leadership, built out a paywall strategy, invested in podcasting, and launched a dedicated digital innovation function under an Executive Editor for Digital Innovation. In 2024, NMG recorded 11 percent growth in its digital business — meaningful, but from a small base.

Azizi’s pledge to “increase investment” and accelerate digital transformation is therefore not just strategic ambition — it is financial necessity. At the press conference on March 11, he committed to job creation and framed the investment explicitly around making NMG’s digital transformation commercially viable: “Our intention is to increase investment so that we can be more profitable. There will be more jobs created as we go forward.”

What the Market Thinks — and What It Doesn’t Yet Know

The stock market has delivered its initial verdict with unusual clarity. On Wednesday, when NMG traded without the standard 10 percent daily movement cap — granted because the announcement had been made after the close of the previous session, qualifying it as a material disclosure — the share rose 19.2 percent in a single session. It added a further 7.6 percent the following day. Investors moved 298,887 shares valued at Ksh4.84 million over the two days — modest in absolute terms for a company with 190.295 million issued shares, but the price signal is unambiguous.

Shareholders appear to have taken comfort in three things: Azizi’s prior media experience, his explicit commitment to keeping NMG listed on the NSE, and his positioning as a long-term anchor shareholder for an institution that has sometimes felt rudderless during its financial difficulties. For a stock that had drifted for years under the weight of loss-making results and dividend suspensions, the arrival of a committed majority owner with sector knowledge is a meaningful change in the investment case.

What remains unanswered — and what will define the deal’s longer-term legacy — are the questions the market cannot yet price. How will Azizi’s ownership affect editorial independence at a media house whose credibility has been built on exactly that quality? Press freedom observers have noted that Tanzania’s media environment carries constraints that Kenya’s, for all its imperfections, does not share to the same degree. Azizi’s response has been to lean on pledges: he has committed to upholding NMG’s editorial traditions and framed himself as a steward rather than a controller of the institution. Those commitments will be tested over time, in the coverage decisions that editors make and in whether the resources required to do serious journalism — investigative work, regional bureaus, qualified journalists — actually expand.

The NMG story is, in microcosm, the story of African media in a digital transition that is restructuring the business while the underlying public-interest mission remains as important as ever. The region’s 62 million digital users that NMG now reaches represent an audience with real appetite for credible journalism. The question is whether a new ownership structure — one driven by a commercially minded regional investor — will accelerate the transformation needed to serve that audience sustainably, or whether the pressure to return the business to profitability will reshape the journalism that has made NMG worth acquiring in the first place.

For now, the share price says the market believes in the deal. The harder test will come in the months and years that follow.

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Photo Source: Google

By: Montel Kamau

Serrari Financial Analyst

13th March, 2026