Gautam Adani’s Africa empire: Tanzania port, Kenya collapse
Gautam Adani has been building quietly and losing loudly across Africa at the same time, and the story of how he has managed to do both simultaneously tells you almost everything you need to know about the ambitions, methods and liabilities of India's second-richest man.
The 63-year-old billionaire is worth $72.8 billion, controls one of the most powerful infrastructure conglomerates in Asia, and is now the operator of the largest container terminal in East Africa. He also had $2.5 billion in African deals cancelled in a single afternoon in November 2024, after a US court charged him with paying $265 million in bribes to Indian government officials. Both things are true simultaneously. That is Gautam Adani's Africa chapter as it stands.
From diamond sorter to port operator
Adani did not start with a plan for Africa. He started with almost nothing. Born in 1962 in Ahmedabad into a modest Gujarati family of 9 children, he dropped out of school at 16 and took a train to Mumbai, where he sorted diamonds for a trading house called Mahendra Brothers. He was 16 years old. By 18 he had made his first significant money trading diamonds. By 21 he was back in Ahmedabad, managing his brother's plastics unit and importing polyvinyl chloride through commodity trading networks. In 1988 he founded Adani Group, initially a commodity trading house, and over the next 3 decades turned it into a conglomerate that controls India's ports, airports, power plants, transmission lines, data centres, cement factories and defence manufacturing operations.
His model has always been the same: find infrastructure that a country needs but cannot build fast enough on its own, offer to finance and operate it, and capture the long-term cash flow. It worked spectacularly in India, where his political proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi accelerated the process considerably, turning Adani Ports into the country's largest private port operator with control of approximately 44% of India's containerised ocean trade. The same model is now being applied to Africa.
Tanzania: the deal that worked
On May 31, 2024, Adani's port arm APSEZ signed a 30-year concession agreement with the Tanzania Ports Authority to operate Container Terminal 2 at the Port of Dar es Salaam. It was the first serious African acquisition by Adani Ports, and it was structured with the precision of a company that knows exactly what it is doing.
The terminal, known as CT2, has 4 berths, an annual capacity of 1 million standard containers, and handled approximately 820,000 container units in 2023, representing 83% of Tanzania's total container volumes. The previous operator was Hutchison Port Holdings of Hong Kong, which had its concession expire without renewal. Adani stepped in through a joint venture called East Africa Gateway Limited, formed with Abu Dhabi's AD Ports Group and a local entity called East Harbour Terminals Limited. The acquisition price for a 95% stake in the operating company was $39.5 million, a modest entry point for one of the most strategically important pieces of logistics infrastructure in the region.
Dar es Salaam Port handles approximately 95% of Tanzania's international trade and serves as the principal gateway for landlocked nations including Zambia, the DRC, Rwanda, Uganda and Malawi. Whoever controls CT2 controls a significant portion of the container flow for an enormous and growing hinterland. Adani understood this. His son Karan Adani, who runs APSEZ as managing director, described the deal as central to the group's ambition of becoming one of the largest port operators globally by 2030. Tanzania was also in separate discussions with Adani Energy for a $900 million power transmission deal, suggesting the group was pursuing the same dual ports-and-energy play that it had been assembling in India.
Kenya: the deal that collapsed
If Tanzania shows Adani's Africa strategy working, Kenya shows what happens when his legal problems arrive before the contracts are finalised.
In March 2024, Adani Airports Holdings submitted an unsolicited proposal to Kenya Airports Authority to upgrade and operate Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi under a 30-year build-operate-transfer arrangement. The deal, valued at approximately $1.85 billion in infrastructure investment, would have given Adani a new passenger terminal, a second runway, expanded facilities and, after the lease term, an 18% equity stake in the airport itself. The Kenyan government, straining under debt and politically keen to demonstrate infrastructure progress, was receptive. Within 17 days of the proposal landing on the KAA's desk, Adani's subsidiary had been cleared to proceed with a feasibility study.
Separately and at roughly the same time, Kenya's electricity transmission company KETRACO signed a $736 million, 30-year PPP deal with Adani Energy Solutions for 3 power transmission lines. The 2 deals together brought Adani's Kenya exposure to approximately $2.5 billion.
The public reaction was immediate and intense. Airport workers unions threatened strikes. The Law Society of Kenya filed petitions. Civil society groups including the Katiba Institute and Kenya Human Rights Commission challenged the deals in court, arguing the process lacked public participation and transparency, that the concession fee arrangement gave Adani access to existing airport revenue rather than just new assets it would build, and that the overall terms gave away a national asset that generates income representing more than 5% of GDP.
In September 2024, the High Court issued conservatory orders suspending both deals pending hearings. The following month, the US Department of Justice unsealed a 5-count criminal indictment against Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar Adani, alleging they had paid more than $265 million in bribes to officials in 5 Indian states to secure solar energy contracts for Adani Green Energy, and had raised $3 billion from US investors while concealing the alleged bribery scheme. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed separate civil charges the same day.
Within days, President William Ruto announced in his State of the Nation address that both Kenyan deals were cancelled. He cited "new evidence from local investigative agencies and information from partner states." The Kenya Airports Authority formally confirmed the cancellation before the High Court in February 2026.
The cost to Adani's Africa plans was immediate and specific. The JKIA deal was gone. The KETRACO deal was gone. The political cover that President Ruto had been providing, arguing that private financing was Kenya's only realistic option for infrastructure investment, evaporated overnight. The airport remains without a serious upgrade plan. Raila Odinga, the African Union Commission chairman, described the outcome as a "major disappointment" that had ceded Kenya's aviation hub ambitions to Ethiopia.
Who Adani is and why Africa matters to him
Adani's group has been described in equal measure as India's most important infrastructure builder and its most controversial conglomerate. The Hindenburg Research report of January 2023, which accused the group of systematic stock manipulation and accounting fraud, briefly erased more than $100 billion from Adani Group's combined market capitalisation before he stabilised it through a combination of asset sales, debt reduction and public investor relations. The Indian Supreme Court dismissed calls for a special investigation in January 2024.
The US bribery charges are a separate and still unresolved matter. The indictment covers alleged conduct in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jammu and Kashmir and Tamil Nadu, all relating to solar energy contracts awarded to Adani Green Energy. Adani has denied all charges as baseless. In January 2026, after the SEC asked a court for help serving summonses, both Gautam Adani and Sagar Adani agreed to receive legal notice and have 90 days to respond. The case is therefore not resolved and not going away.
Africa matters to Adani for the same reasons it matters to every infrastructure operator who has saturated their home market: the continent is growing, its port capacity is underdeveloped relative to its economic trajectory, its energy transmission networks need capital, and its governments are often willing to accept terms that would face more scrutiny in Europe or North America. The Dar es Salaam deal was a textbook application of that logic. The Kenya collapse was a demonstration of what happens when a company's legal environment changes faster than its contracts can be signed.
What comes next
In May 2025, Bloomberg reported that APSEZ was evaluating port projects in South Africa and was actively looking at East Africa and West Africa for new opportunities. Karan Adani was explicit: "We are evaluating port projects in South Africa to boost our presence in Africa." No deal has been announced as of April 2026.
The Tanzania operation is active and running. The South Africa evaluation is ongoing. The US case is unresolved. The question that African governments considering Adani proposals now have to answer is whether the value of his infrastructure expertise and financing capacity outweighs the legal and reputational exposure that comes with the Adani name. Kenya's experience suggests that the political calculus can shift very fast when that exposure becomes visible.
Adani built Mundra Port into India's largest private commercial port starting from a patch of marsh on the Gujarat coast in the 1990s. He has replicated that model, with varying degrees of success, in Israel, Sri Lanka and now Tanzania. Whether Africa becomes a serious pillar of the Adani empire, or remains a continent where his ambitions exceeded his ability to manage his legal environment, will be answered in the next 3 to 5 years as the South Africa evaluation either turns into a concession or becomes another entry in the list of deals that did not happen.
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