Earlier this week, Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) announced it had agreed to sell its entire shareholding in NPRT Holdings Africa Limited — the vehicle holding 54.08% of Nation Media Group (NMG) — to Taarifa, owned by Tanzanian businessman Rostam Aziz. The buyer said it did not plan to buy out remaining shareholders or delist NMG, and the parties expected closing within three to four months, subject to approvals.

That deal is now the headline. But the run-up to it is the real story.

Between 2020 and 2025, the organization crossed a threshold: digital transformation stopped being a strategic ambition and became an urgent exercise in survival — defined by shrinking revenue, recurring restructuring, and a late push to monetize a large digital audience that still wasn’t generating enough cash.

This installment examines the “restructuring years”: the Covid shock, the partial recovery, the return to losses, and the governance and ownership moves that preceded the 2026 exit of the Aga Khan’s investment arm. The public record shows NMG building audience reach (60M+ users) and growing digital business year-on-year, yet still reporting losses and cutting deeply into costs.

A former senior NMG employee, interviewed on background for this series, argues that the company’s core problem wasn’t awareness (“everyone knew digital mattered”) but the gap between digital rhetoric and institutional execution — especially around unified technology and monetization. Those claims are clearly captured below and should be treated as reporting leads unless corroborated by documents or additional on-record sources.

Covid made the business model visible

NMG’s 2020 annual report is blunt about what the pandemic did to the legacy business. The Group posted turnover of KSh 6.8 billion and profit before tax of KSh 0.1 billion, compared with KSh 9.1 billion and KSh 1.3 billion in 2019. The report also notes that movement restrictions hit circulation, while digital consumption accelerated and drove significant uptake of the ePaper.

This is the pivot point that matters: in 2020, NMG’s economics exposed which parts of the machine were fragile (print) and which were growing (digital formats and broadcast). The same report describes a second-half rebound across revenue streams, including “double digit growth” in television, radio, and digital compared to the first half — an early sign that audiences were still there, but the monetization mix was changing.

The former senior NMG employee describes 2020 as the moment internal debates “stopped being theoretical.” Their account is that Covid forced the organization to confront a hard truth: the company had large audiences but lacked a subscription-grade engine and unified data layer to convert those audiences into predictable revenue.

A rebound that didn’t change the fundamentals

In 2021, NMG recovered some ground. The Chairman’s statement reports turnover of KSh 7.6 billion and profit before tax of KSh 0.7 billion, improving on 2020’s KSh 6.8 billion and KSh 0.1 billion. It attributes the recovery to reopening economies plus “accelerated digital initiatives,” alongside television and print revenue recovery and targeted cost management.

This is the pattern that repeats through the decade: a partial recovery driven by a mix of macro conditions and operational tightening — without a structural breakthrough in digital unit economics. In hindsight, the 2021 rebound appears less like a turnaround and more like a temporary stabilization while platform and consumer behavior continued shifting underneath.

Losses return, and transformation becomes cost-cutting

By 2023–2024, the financial story became more severe and more explicit. In the 2024 Chairman’s statement, NMG reports turnover of KSh 6.2 billion (down 12.5% year-on-year) and notes that despite that decline, the Group recorded 11% growth in its digital business. It also states that loss before tax improved only marginally — from KSh 0.4 billion in 2023 to KSh 0.3 billion in 2024 — helped by a 17.2% reduction in operating costs.

The CEO’s 2024 statement reinforces the same tension: digital business grew 11% due to “improved monetization” that benefited from audience growth to 62.4 million users (up from 60.2 million in the prior year). Yet the company still posted a loss before tax of KSh 0.3 billion.

In other words: NMG’s audience scale is not in question. Its ability to turn that scale into profit is.

Public reporting in Kenya adds a key operational detail: a one-off staff restructuring expense of KSh 157.8 million in 2024, which was reported as as a major driver of the year’s loss and part of a broader payroll reduction strategy.

The former senior NMG employee argues that repeated restructuring cycles created a self-reinforcing trap: cost-cutting improved near-term losses but also weakened the organization’s capacity to execute the deeper work (platform unification, product iteration, subscription experience design). They describe it as “shrinking to survive while needing to invest to grow.”

HY2025: the loss narrows, but the model still doesn’t clear profitability

By mid-2025, the official numbers show measurable progress — but also continued fragility.

In the results for six months to 30 June 2025, NMG reports a reduction of 85.9% in operating loss before income tax, to KSh 48.7 million (from KSh 345.8 million in the same period the prior year). Turnover was KSh 2.993 billion — 5.7% below the prior year’s half — while “digital business” grew 7.0% year-on-year, leveraging a base of 63.8 million users. Loss after income tax was KSh 41.7 million.

The HY2025 statement also signals where management believed the future lay: it cites a “rebuild” of broadcasting supported by investment in talent, content, and technology, and says the Group continues to invest in “unified technology to enhance customer experience across our platforms” and accelerate monetization of digital assets.

This language matters because it maps directly onto the product/technology gaps raised earlier in this series: fragmented platforms, inconsistent subscription experiences, and weak unified identity.

The run-up to 2026: succession, restructuring, and the holding-company move

The ownership change announced in March 2026 did not emerge out of nowhere. NMG’s own Chairman frames 2024 as a point of transition: the Group welcomed Geoffrey Odundo as Managing Director and CEO in April 2025, following the retirement of Stephen Gitagama after 17 years’ service (six as Group CEO).

More subtly, 2025 reshaped the corporate plumbing. In July 2025, AKFED announced it would transfer its 92,618,177 ordinary shares (54.08%) to NPRT Holdings Africa Limited, a Kenyan subsidiary. It was also reported that the CMA approved the transfer and granted NPRT an exemption from making a mandatory takeover offer to minority shareholders, citing unchanged beneficial ownership.

At the time, this was framed as an internal reorganization. In retrospect, it also created a clean, Kenya-incorporated vessel through which control could later change hands — exactly what happened when AKFED agreed to sell NPRT to Taarifa earlier this week. 

Timeline of key events (2020–2026)

Conclusion: what Part Three proves, and what Part Four will test

Part Three’s core finding is straightforward: NMG entered the 2020s with a shrinking legacy revenue base and an expanding digital audience, but without a monetization system strong enough to convert scale into durable profit. Public filings show the organization reducing losses through restructuring, process digitization, and a push toward unified technology — yet still operating at a loss in HY2025.

Part Four will examine what the new ownership reality means: what a majority shareholder committed to “accelerating digital transformation” can realistically do, what regulatory and governance signals matter most, and whether NMG’s next phase is a turnaround, a permanently smaller hybrid model, or an asset-led restructuring.