Forbes counts one Tanzanian billionaire. There are more.

Edha Nahdi paid $183 million in cash for 95% of Bamburi Cement in December 2024, outbidding Rwanda’s Cimerwa in one of the largest corporate takeovers Kenya has recorded. Eight months later, published estimates of his personal fortune stood at $90 million.

Forbes lists a single billionaire in Tanzania, a country of 68 million people with an economy of roughly $85 billion growing at about 6% a year. The transaction record of the past two years does not obviously support that count.

How the rankings get made

Wealth compilers price what they can see. Listed shares carry a daily market value that anyone can multiply. Private companies do not, which means a compiler either obtains audited accounts, persuades the owner to discuss the business, or estimates from whatever fragments exist.

Tanzania offers little of the first two. The Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange lists few of the country’s largest private groups. Company registry data is thin. Neither Forbes nor Bloomberg maintains substantial wealth-tracking capacity in East Africa, with both concentrating resources in the United States, Europe and Asia and covering African fortunes principally through South Africa and Nigeria.

The consequence is that a Tanzanian conglomerate which publishes nothing and grants no interviews produces no data for a compiler to work with. Its owner is not disputed. He is absent.

Mohammed Dewji

Dewji is valued by Forbes at $2.1 billion and ranked fourteenth in Africa. He is the only Tanzanian on the list.

MeTL Group was founded by his father, Gulamabbas Dewji, in the 1970s as a trading business. It now operates across ten to eleven African countries in textile manufacturing, flour milling, beverages, edible oils, agriculture, real estate, finance and logistics. Dewji has said publicly that it employs more than 24,000 people, generates annual revenue above $2 billion and accounts for over 3% of Tanzanian gross domestic product.

He has engaged with the ranking process more than any other Tanzanian businessman. He gives interviews to international outlets, discusses his companies’ finances, signed the Giving Pledge committing at least half his wealth to philanthropy, and has made himself available to the organisations that compile these lists.

He served as member of parliament for Singida Urban. In October 2018 he was kidnapped outside a hotel gym in Dar es Salaam and held for nine days before being released. He has said he intends to become the largest farmer in Africa, and separately bid $10 million for a controlling stake in Simba SC, one of the country’s leading football clubs.

Rostam Aziz

Forbes named Aziz Tanzania’s first dollar billionaire in 2013 and later ranked him among the fifty wealthiest Africans at about $900 million. Henley and Partners described him in its 2022 Africa Wealth Report as the only dollar billionaire in East Africa, which contradicted the Forbes position on Dewji. Billionaires.Africa currently estimates his fortune at roughly TSh 1.75 trillion, about $700 million.

The published figures have moved downward over thirteen years. His asset base has moved the other way.

Aziz partnered with Madagascar’s Axian Group in 2022 to acquire Millicom’s Tanzanian operations, taking over the Tigo and Zantel mobile networks. He holds a significant position in Vodacom Tanzania. His Taifa Gas has built liquefied petroleum gas import terminals at Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar and is completing a third at the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone outside Mombasa, at a cost of about $130 million. President William Ruto described that project at its groundbreaking as the largest private foreign direct investment in Kenya since 1977.

Taifa Gas has separately agreed to acquire 49% of PanAfrican Energy, which operates Tanzania’s Songo Songo gas field, giving the group a position in production as well as import and distribution.

In March, Aziz bought control of Nation Media Group. His vehicle Taarifa Ltd acquired 100% of NPRT Holdings Africa from the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, which held 92,618,177 NMG shares, or 54.08% of the company. The sale ended a 66-year association between the Aga Khan and the media house, which operates in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, reaches more than 62 million digital users and employs over 1,000 journalists and media staff. It trades on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

He also runs Selous LLC from Dubai, managing investments in real estate, mining and energy, and is a former CCM member of parliament and long-standing financier of the ruling party.

Aziz stopped engaging with wealth compilers years ago.

Said Salim Bakhresa

Bakhresa was born in Zanzibar in 1949 and left school at fourteen because his family could not support him. He sold potato mix, then ran a restaurant through the 1970s, then moved into grain milling.

Bakhresa Group now comprises more than forty companies across East and Southern Africa. The flagship, Said Salim Bakhresa and Company Limited, dominates Tanzanian wheat milling and logistics. The wider portfolio covers sugar, beverages, frozen foods, confectionery, packaging, oil trading and recycling. Azam TV competes with MultiChoice across the region. AzamPay operates in digital payments. Azam Marine runs the ferry services between Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar and on Lake Victoria. There is an aviation arm and Hotel Verde in Zanzibar.

The group employs more than 8,000 people directly and buys crops from over 100,000 farmers. Daily manufacturing capacity has been reported at 2,100 metric tonnes.

Forbes last valued Bakhresa at $600 million in 2015, ranking him thirty-sixth on its Africa’s 50 Richest list. The figure has not been updated in eleven years. Billionaires.Africa currently estimates $400 million, below the Forbes number from more than a decade ago.

Bakhresa Group reported sales of $800 million in 2011. It has since committed about $500 million to doubling beverage production capacity, roughly $300 million to a sugar plant, and $120 million to a fruit processing factory outside Dar es Salaam. It spent $30 million acquiring a controlling stake in Blue Ribbon Industries, a Zimbabwean flour miller.

Those four commitments total more than $950 million, by Billionaires.Africa’s calculation, against a published valuation of $400 million.

Bakhresa gives almost no interviews and has never discussed his wealth publicly. His sons run the operating companies. He married Fathiya Bakhresa and they have six children.

Edha Nahdi

Nahdi turned forty last year. He founded Camel Oil Tanzania in 2006 at nineteen, importing and distributing bulk petroleum products, and built that business into Amsons Group.

The group now operates in six countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo, across petroleum, cement, wheat milling, logistics, inland container depots and real estate. The Mbeya Cement acquisition raised its cement capacity to 6,000 tonnes a day. It runs a wheat mill with capacity of 500 tonnes a day.

The Kenyan transactions made him visible outside Tanzania for the first time.

Amsons completed the Bamburi purchase in December 2024. In November 2025 its subsidiary Kalahari Cement bought a 29.2% stake in East African Portland Cement from Holcim for Sh718.66 million. Combined with the 12.5% Bamburi already held, that made Amsons the largest single shareholder in EAPCC with 41.75%. Kenyan lawmakers raised objections and at one point threatened to block the transaction.

Kalahari Cement is held through two Mauritius companies Nahdi owns outright, Pacific Cement with 90% and Comercio Et Consiel with 10%.

Amsons is in advanced talks to acquire Oryx Energies, the Geneva-based African fuel distributor, for $250 million, including its Tanzanian fuel and liquefied petroleum gas assets. Nahdi has separately pledged $35 million to build ten Level 4 mother-and-child hospitals across Kenya, described at announcement as the largest private health grant in that country’s history.

Those four commitments come to roughly $474 million since December 2024.

He rejects the description of himself as wealthy. Nahdi told Business Daily last year that media accounts of his fortune are exaggerated and brushed off the tycoon label. He was named African Young Business Leader of the Year in 2015 and rarely speaks publicly, though he addressed the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali in May, telling African businesses to stop depending on foreign donors and start financing the continent’s development themselves.

Where the money is going

The four are part of a broader outflow of Tanzanian capital into Kenya.

Tanzanian investors have injected at least $340.6 million into the Kenyan economy over the past decade, according to Business Daily, across cement, energy and finance. East African Community Secretariat data makes Tanzania the largest single source of foreign direct investment into Kenya among member states, with $72.45 million recorded over six years, reversing a pattern in which capital moved from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam.

Others are involved beyond the four. Ally Edha Awadh founded Lake Oil Group in 2006 and built it to revenues above $1 billion, operating Hashi Energy in Kenya. Billionaires.Africa estimates his fortune at about $180 million.

Nahdi has attributed the flow to political conditions rather than to any single opportunity, telling Business Daily that capital follows opportunity and that good political relations foster economic growth, and crediting Ruto and President Samia Suluhu Hassan with building confidence for bilateral investment.

What the figures do and do not establish

None of the spending described above proves a specific net worth.

Private conglomerates borrow. An acquisition financed substantially with debt does not establish equivalent equity, and neither Amsons nor Bakhresa Group publishes accounts, so the leverage behind their transactions is unknown. Taifa Group is similarly opaque. It is possible for a company to complete a $183 million purchase while its owner is worth considerably less than that.

What the record does establish is that the published estimates are not derived from the transactions. Billionaires.Africa valued Nahdi at $90 million in August 2025, eight months after the Bamburi settlement. Forbes has left Bakhresa’s valuation unchanged since 2015, through a period in which his group committed close to a billion dollars to new plant. Aziz has been marked down while acquiring a controlling stake in a listed regional media group.

Tanzania spent its first two decades after independence under Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa policy, which nationalised most large enterprises and discouraged private accumulation. Liberalisation began in the mid-1980s. The fortunes built since have had roughly forty years to compound inside companies that report to nobody.

Forbes lists one Tanzanian billionaire. Between them, the other three named here have committed or agreed more than $1.4 billion to acquisitions, plant and philanthropy since 2011.