Tanzanian billionaire Rostam Aziz puts his own chief of staff on Nation Media Group's board

Nation Media Group has named six new directors and lost four, and one of the arrivals works for Rostam Aziz.

Georgia Mutagahywa is chief of staff to Aziz at Taifa Group of Companies, the Tanzanian conglomerate he chairs. She now sits on the board of the Nairobi-listed publisher of the Daily Nation, Business Daily and The EastAfrican, five months after Aziz bought control of it.

The other five arrivals are established Kenyan names. Julie Gichuru, the broadcaster, now runs the Africa Leadership and Dialogue Institute. Julius Kipng'etich is chief executive of Jubilee Insurance Group. Wilfred Musau formerly ran National Bank of Kenya. Juliana Rotich is a technology executive. Bharat Thakrar built and then left WPP Scangroup, Kenya's largest marketing group.

Sultan Allana, Fayyaz Nurmohamed, Al-noor Ramji and Nancy Booker are out.

Aziz took the company through Taarifa Ltd, a private vehicle he owns outright and created for the purpose, buying the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development's 54.08% holding of 92,618,177 shares in a deal announced on March 9. It closed a 66-year association. Prince Karim Aga Khan IV bought the Kiswahili weekly Taifa Leo in 1959 and built it into a group operating across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, employing more than 1,000 people and reaching 62 million digital users a month.

Aziz, 65, grew up in Igunga, a rural constituency in Tanzania's Tabora region, and is of Iranian Baloch descent. Forbes named him Tanzania's first dollar billionaire in 2013. He has since fallen off the list.

Telecoms made him. He built a 35% stake in Vodacom Tanzania through Cavalry Holdings, sold 17.2% of the company to South Africa's Vodacom Group in May 2014 for an estimated $250 million, and cleared the rest through Mirambo Holdings in 2019 for $220 million. He holds a stake in MIC Tanzania, which owns the mobile operators Tigo and Zantel, and controls Caspian Mining, the country's largest contract miner, whose clients have included De Beers and Barrick Gold. Taifa Group also spans gas, aviation, agriculture, conservation and property in Dubai and Oman.

His politics are the reason the Mutagahywa appointment is worth reporting.

Aziz sat in Tanzania's parliament for Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the party that has governed since independence, and has kept close relations with successive presidents including the incumbent, Samia Suluhu Hassan. In Kenya, President William Ruto commissioned Aziz's $130 million Taifa Gas import terminal at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone in Mombasa in February 2023. Ruto used the ceremony to say the project had been held up by government obstruction that he had personally ended. It was described as the largest single private foreign direct investment in Kenya since 1977.

The newspapers charged with holding that government to account now answer to a shareholder who has that relationship with its president. Press freedom organisations said so when the deal was announced. Aziz answered them at a Nairobi press conference, saying he supported credible and independent journalism as essential to the development of society.

He has also told the market he is not going further. Taarifa says it has no plans to make a mandatory offer for the remaining shares or to delist, and the company continues to trade on the Nairobi Securities Exchange and its cross-listings.

What he bought is losing money. Revenue fell 4.8% to 2.85 billion shillings in the six months to June, the weakest first half in 21 years, and the net loss widened to 357.2 million shillings from 41.7 million. Nation Media pointed to higher provisions for uncollected debts, including delayed government payments, rising fuel costs, lower interest income and a print business that keeps shrinking.

Joe Muganda, the chairman, said the new directors bring experience across media, communications, technology, digital transformation, financial services, corporate leadership, governance, marketing and stakeholder engagement, and thanked those departing.

Two of the appointments arrive with their own baggage. Thakrar's exit from WPP Scangroup produced litigation, and he won a High Court appeal this week over a privacy ruling concerning his WhatsApp messages. Aziz fell out with Nation Media Group himself years ago over its coverage of a Tanzanian election campaign.

The test will be what the Daily Nation prints about Ruto over the next twelve months.