South African media mogul Given Mkhari built four radio stations from scratch

Given Mkhari owns four radio stations, and he started every one of them by applying to the regulator for a licence rather than buying into an existing broadcaster.

That is an unusual route in South Africa. Most black-owned business built since 1994 came through negotiated stakes in companies somebody else had already built, usually financed by banks and secured against the shares being bought.

His holding company, SHILUMANA Group, was known until recently as MSG Afrika. It owns Capricorn FM in Limpopo, Power 98.7 in Gauteng, Rhythm FM in the Eastern Cape and Beat 105.2 in the Free State, and now describes itself as a pan-African media, digital infrastructure, technology and investment group. Its executives own all of it.

A radio in Tzaneen

Mkhari grew up in Tzaneen, a farming town in Limpopo, and radio was the only medium he had. "There was no TV back then; all I had was the radio," he told Forbes Africa in 2012.

He went to Bankuna High School and took a bachelor's degree and a higher education diploma at the University of the North, now the University of Limpopo. While there he co-founded a campus radio station, which his company says was the first campus-based station licensed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the regulator of the time.

He then went to Bard College in New York, studying macroeconomics, African literature and international politics.

On air

He founded MSG Afrika in 1998 and set up MSG Afrika Investment Holdings in 2002 as a private equity vehicle for technology, media and telecommunications.

He kept broadcasting through the early years, presenting The Given Mkhari Show on Metro FM and Kaya Talk on Kaya FM, before retiring from the microphone to concentrate on the business. The president appointed him a director of the International Marketing Council of South Africa, the body that promoted the country's image abroad, a seat he held until 2009.

Limpopo first

Capricorn FM came in 2007, built with Simphiwe Mdlalose, a friend from university.

Radio in Limpopo was divided by language, with stations serving individual communities. The two of them argued there was room for one station speaking to the whole province, and it became the first commercial station in Limpopo and South Africa's first wholly black-owned regional commercial station. The Industrial Development Corporation financed it.

SHILUMANA owns all of it.

The last licence in Gauteng

Power 98.7 went on air on June 18, 2013, after the regulator awarded it a commercial FM licence in December 2011.

It was the last FM frequency available in Gauteng, the province that holds Johannesburg, Pretoria and about a quarter of South Africa's population. Winning it made Power the first fully black-owned radio station in the province and its first talk station of the post-apartheid era, positioned directly against Primedia's long-established Talk Radio 702.

The National Empowerment Fund put in 36.2 million rand of seed capital.

The shareholder register was unusually broad. MSG Afrika Media held the majority, with Khanyi Dhlomo's Ndalo Media, Sandile Zungu's Zungu Investments, African Women Chartered Accountants, the empowerment fund and management holding minority stakes. Mkhari held about 70% at one stage.

The agency deal

The one transaction that looked like a conventional empowerment deal was the one Mkhari describes least conventionally.

MSG Afrika invested in The Jupiter Drawing Room, one of South Africa's leading advertising agencies, in March 2004 and again in July 2006. It was among the last major agencies to do an equity deal, and it chose young black partners with no advertising track record at a time when most of the industry had signed with established business figures.

Mkhari has said the agency handed management to its new black owners rather than parking them in a corner, with some of the founders staying on as employees and minority shareholders.

He sold in two stages, in January 2009 and March 2020.

The years everyone said he was selling

Power spent its first two years being written off.

Presenters left through 2014 and 2015, including Chris Vick, Siki Mgabadeli, Azania Mosaka and Eusebius McKaiser. Official figures put listenership at about 83,000 in February 2015, a number the industry disputed, and Vick said publicly that the station was ripe for takeover by a large media group.

Radio licences were changing hands at the time. Times Media Group spent more than 360 million rand on broadcast assets in a single year, and Power held a Gauteng frequency nobody else could obtain.

Mkhari refused to sell, saying the station was not for sale and that the group would rather buy more of it.

Two more provinces

SHILUMANA has since won licences for Rhythm FM in the Eastern Cape and Beat 105.2 in the Free State, taking it to four stations in four provinces.

Alongside the radio sit Quizzical Pictures, a television and film production company, The Communications Firm, and MSG Group Sales, which sells advertising across the group.

The chairman's chair

Mkhari still uses the microphone once a year.

He hosts The Chairman's Conversation, an event broadcast on Power 98.7 with the news channel eNCA, where he interviews the country's most powerful business figures in front of an invited audience. Discovery chief executive Adrian Gore took the seat in October 2025.

He received the special achievement award at the Kaelo Awards in 2014 for building Power.

South Africa's broadcast frequencies are finite and allocated by the regulator, and it has awarded Mkhari four of them.