Tanzanian Billionaire Rostam Azizi Takes Control of Nation Media Group as Aga Khan Ends 66-Year Chapter

One of the most consequential ownership changes in East African media history was formalised on Tuesday at Serena Hotel in Nairobi, where two men sat across a table and signed documents that transferred majority control of Nation Media Group — the region’s largest independent media house — from an institution that built it over six decades to a Tanzanian billionaire with a sprawling business empire and a track record in the sector that is both impressive and contested.

The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) has entered into an agreement to sell its 100 percent shareholding in NPRT Holdings Africa Limited to Taarifa Ltd, a company owned by Tanzanian businessman Rostam Azizi. NPRT Holdings Africa Limited is the investment vehicle through which AKFED holds a 54.08 percent controlling stake in Nation Media Group, representing 92,618,177 ordinary shares. Taarifa Ltd is an affiliate of Azizi’s broader Taifa Group conglomerate.

No financial terms were disclosed. Based on NMG’s closing share price of 13.25 Kenyan shillings on Tuesday, the stake carries a market valuation of approximately 1.23 billion Kenyan shillings. The transaction is expected to conclude within three to four months, subject to regulatory approvals from the relevant authorities.

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What Is Being Transferred — and What Isn’t

The transaction transfers majority ownership of NMG to Azizi. It does not trigger a delisting, nor does it constitute a mandatory buyout offer for the remaining shares. NMG will continue trading on four regional securities exchanges: the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the Uganda Securities Exchange, the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange, and the Rwanda Securities Exchange. Taarifa Ltd has explicitly confirmed it does not intend to acquire the remaining minority shares or to delist the company from any of those platforms, meaning existing public shareholders — both retail and institutional — will continue to hold their stakes in the group.

In a joint statement, AKFED and Taarifa Ltd said that NMG is “now poised to expand its impact through further investment in its digital transformation,” with Taarifa Ltd committed to “accelerating NMG’s digital growth, enabling the group to strengthen its connection with customers and build on its long-standing tradition of public interest journalism.”

A 66-Year Story Ends

The significance of the sale cannot be overstated in the context of East African media history. The Aga Khan’s relationship with what would become Nation Media Group stretches back to April 28, 1959, when His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV acquired a modest Kiswahili weekly called Taifa from former District Commissioner Charles Hayes and his business partner for £10,000. The acquisition was made through the newly formed East African Newspapers (Nation Series) Ltd under AKFED, with an explicitly stated mission: to create a media platform that gave voice to Kenya’s African majority in the closing years of colonial rule.

That Kiswahili weekly quickly evolved. Taifa Leo — meaning “The Nation Today” — became the first daily Kiswahili newspaper in East Africa. Then, on March 20, 1960, the Daily Nation launched and grew rapidly into the most widely circulated English-language newspaper in East Africa, surpassing established colonial papers that had dominated the market. NMG posted its first profit in 1968 and listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange in 1973 — one of the first media companies on the continent to do so.

What followed was six decades of editorial significance. NMG covered Kenya’s return to multiparty politics in the 1990s, provided civic education during the 2010 constitutional referendum, launched NTV Kenya and Easy FM in 1999, and expanded its footprint into Uganda and Tanzania. Today, the group operates more than 30 brands across four countries, reaches a combined digital audience of over 62 million users, and employs more than 1,000 professionals across the region.

Sultan Ali Allana, Director of AKFED, acknowledged the weight of the moment at Tuesday’s signing. “AKFED is proud of its contribution to building one of Africa’s most respected media institutions,” he said. “We are confident NMG will continue to uphold the values of independent journalism and service to the public that have defined it for over six decades.”

In 2016, AKFED oversaw the installation of a state-of-the-art printing press along Mombasa Road in Nairobi with a capacity to print 86,000 newspapers per hour — a physical monument to the depth of its investment in the institution. That the press was commissioned by the Aga Khan himself speaks to how personally invested the institution remained even as digital publishing began to transform the economics of the industry.

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Who Is Rostam Azizi?

The incoming majority owner of NMG is not a figure who requires introduction in East African business circles, though his profile varies sharply depending on who you ask. Rostam Abdulrasul Azizi was born in Igunga, Tanzania, and educated at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, where he read Economics. He entered politics at 26, eventually serving as MP for the Igunga constituency in the Tabora Region from 1994 until his resignation in 2011. He was also CCM National Treasurer from 2005 to 2007 and a member of the party’s Politburo and Central Committee from 2006 to 2011.

His business career, however, eclipsed his political one. In 2013, Forbes named him as Tanzania’s first dollar billionaire. His conglomerate — now operating as Taifa Group — spans an extraordinarily diverse set of industries. Through Taifa Gas, he operates the largest LPG distributor in Tanzania, with storage capacity of 7,450 metric tonnes and export operations into Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan. He also controls Caspian Mining, Tanzania’s largest contract mining company, which services partners including De Beers, Barrick Gold, and AngloGold Ashanti.

His telecommunications history is equally substantial. He facilitated Vodacom South Africa’s entry into Tanzania and once held an estimated 35 percent stake in Vodacom Tanzania — the country’s leading mobile network. He sold 17 percent of that stake in 2014 for approximately $250 million and sold his remaining shares in 2019 for an estimated $220 million, pocketing close to $500 million from the two transactions combined. More recently, his Taifa Aviation Company acquired a majority stake in Coastal Aviation, a safari and charter carrier operating across Tanzania.

His presence in Kenya has grown significantly over the past few years. The most visible expression of that expansion is the Taifa Gas LPG terminal at Dongo Kundu in Mombasa’s Special Economic Zone — a $130 million facility designed to store up to 30,000 tonnes of LPG that, when complete, is expected to be one of the largest of its kind in East Africa. President William Ruto launched the plant in February 2023, describing it as a landmark private investment in the region’s energy sector. The project has not been without turbulence: in 2025, Kenya’s Environment and Land Court suspended construction following a petition by two Likoni residents raising environmental concerns, and Azizi is currently contesting that order.

A Familiar Name in the Media Business

What makes this transaction structurally different from a straightforward acquisition by a financial investor is that Azizi is not arriving in the media sector for the first time. He was a co-founder and shareholder of Mwananchi Communications Limited between 2000 and 2006, during which time he helped establish three publications: Mwananchi, The Citizen, and Mwanaspoti. Those papers were later acquired by Nation Media Group as part of NMG’s own regional expansion strategy. In a certain historical irony, Azizi is now buying the organisation that eventually purchased his founding media venture.

He currently controls Habari Corporation, a Tanzanian media operation, alongside New Habari Limited, which publishes influential Swahili titles including Mtanzania, The African, Bingwa, Dimba, and Rai. His prior and ongoing involvement in regional media gives him a context for understanding what he has acquired — and what the editorial and commercial challenges of running a large, multi-platform media group actually involve.

His track record in the sector, however, has attracted scrutiny. Reports have cited instances in recent years where Azizi pushed NMG to pull down editorial stories about his business interests and issue apologies — episodes that drew criticism from press freedom advocates and raised questions about his relationship with editorial independence at publications he has influence over. Azizi moved quickly on Tuesday to address those concerns head-on.

“NMG is an institution of profound importance to East Africa, and we will uphold its editorial independence while investing in its continued success as the region’s leading independent media organisation,” he said in the joint statement following the signing.

The Digital Transformation Imperative

The shared language of both parties in Tuesday’s announcement was digital transformation — and that framing is telling. NMG, like virtually every legacy print media organisation globally, has been navigating the structural shift from print-first to digital-first business models. Its digital audience of over 62 million users is substantial, but the challenge facing every media organisation in this transition is converting audience scale into sustainable revenue at a time when advertising budgets have followed eyeballs onto social and digital platforms that NMG competes with for attention.

The joint statement frames Azizi’s ownership as an accelerant for that process: NMG under Taarifa Ltd, the companies say, is positioned to expand its digital reach, strengthen audience engagement, and build on its editorial heritage to grow in a media environment that rewards those who can monetise scale effectively. What that looks like in operational terms — whether it means investment in new digital products, expansion into new content verticals, technology infrastructure upgrades, or new commercial partnerships — will become clearer once the transaction clears regulatory review.

What Happens Now

The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals across the jurisdictions in which NMG operates, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. The timeline of three to four months reflects the complexity of satisfying those requirements across four regulatory environments simultaneously.

For NMG’s more than 1,000 employees and its journalists across the region, the practical question is what the change of ownership means in practice — for editorial culture, for investment, and for the independence of a newsroom that has, across its history, covered governments, businesses, and powerful individuals with a degree of accountability that has earned it its reputation. The historical record at NMG is one of institutional resilience under pressure: the Daily Nation survived government bans on its reporters entering Parliament and press gallery restrictions in the 1980s without abandoning its editorial mission. Whether that institutional culture survives a transition to an owner with a known history of exercising commercial pressure on editorial decisions is a question that will be answered in the months and years ahead.

What is clear is that the era defined by the Aga Khan’s founding vision — of an independent press as a democratic public good, built not for commercial return alone but as an expression of a broader commitment to the societies it served — has formally ended. AKFED’s 66-year stewardship of NMG was one of the longest and most consequential in African media history. The institution it leaves behind is large, influential, and facing precisely the challenges that define the global media industry at this moment. Whether Rostam Azizi’s tenure begins a new chapter of editorial strength and digital growth, or marks a shift toward a more commercially managed relationship between ownership and journalism, will define NMG’s next decade.

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By: Montel Kamau

Serrari Financial Analyst

11th March, 2026