Nigerian musician and investor Oluwatosin “Mr Eazi” Ajibade has acquired a 17.31% stake in Intravenous Infusions Plc, a Ghanaian pharmaceutical manufacturer, through his investment vehicle Zagadat Capital, in a deal that hands the Afrobeats star significant influence over a company that supplies life-saving intravenous fluids to hospitals across West Africa.
The purchase, disclosed in a regulatory filing on the Ghana Stock Exchange on May 18, 2026, has drawn attention not only for its size but for the personal story behind it, one rooted in Mr Eazi’s own experience watching patients struggle to access basic medicine.
A personal motivation
Mr Eazi has said the investment was shaped by what he witnessed during the three years his mother, Ifeoma Edith Ajibade, battled illness before her death. He has described sitting in hospitals and seeing patients go without essential drugs and fluids, an experience that reportedly pushed him toward a sector he had never previously invested in.
Rather than framing the acquisition purely as a financial play, the singer has presented it as a response to a healthcare gap he saw firsthand, one that many families across Nigeria and Ghana quietly live with. That framing has given the deal an emotional resonance rarely attached to a stock market filing, and it has turned a routine shareholding notice into a story that spans grief, entrepreneurship and public health.
The mechanics of the deal
According to the filing, Zagadat Capital GH Ltd acquired 47,514,775 shares in Intravenous Infusions Plc, a company with a total issued share capital of 274,410,000 shares. The purchase was executed entirely through open-market transactions on the Ghana Alternative Exchange, the junior board of the Ghana Stock Exchange reserved for small and medium-sized enterprises, with Laurus Africa Securities acting as the licensed dealing member handling the trades.
Ghanaian securities law requires an investor to disclose a holding only after it crosses a set threshold, which means the buying itself took place over an unspecified period before the notification, accumulated gradually rather than in a single transaction. What is known is that the accumulation appears to have begun soon after Intravenous Infusions published its 2025 annual report, a document that laid bare the company’s financial strain.
A share price that multiplied
The scale of the bet becomes clearer when the share price movement is examined. Intravenous Infusions traded at just 8 pesewas on May 19, the day after the notification became public, close to a 52-week low of 4 pesewas. By the end of July, the stock had climbed as high as 86 pesewas before easing back toward 65 pesewas, an extraordinary run for a thinly traded stock on Ghana’s alternative board.
At that level, Zagadat’s block of shares was worth roughly 30.9 million cedi, close to 2.7 million dollars, against a total company valuation of around 178.4 million cedi, or about 15.7 million dollars. Local commentary on social media has pointed to paper gains in the tens of millions of cedi within a two-month window, though neither Mr Eazi nor Zagadat Capital has disclosed the original purchase price of the shares, making precise profit figures difficult to verify independently.
From Afrobeats to fintech and healthcare
The Intravenous Infusions purchase is the latest move by an entertainer who has steadily built a reputation as one of Africa’s more active celebrity investors. Mr Eazi launched Zagadat Capital in 2021 after founding emPawa Africa, a talent incubator credited with helping launch the careers of artists including Joeboy. Since then, Zagadat has backed a spread of African startups spanning fintech, wellness and logistics, including the Kenyan payments company pawaPay, the remittance lender Paisa, and the wellness brand Eden Life.
The fund also held a position in Vydia, a music distribution technology firm that was sold to the American company Gamma, generating one of the more talked-about paydays in the Afrobeats business world. Healthcare manufacturing, however, marks new territory for Zagadat, and the firm has been explicit that this is not a short-term trade. In its disclosure, Zagadat described the purchase as a long-term strategic investment intended to support Ghana’s healthcare and pharmaceutical manufacturing sector rather than to pursue a takeover or change of control.
Why local drug manufacturing matters
The deal lands at a moment when African governments are actively trying to reduce dependence on imported pharmaceuticals. For decades, Ghana and much of the continent relied heavily on intravenous fluids, saline solutions and other essential medicines shipped in from India, China and Europe.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how fragile that arrangement could be, as disrupted global supply chains left some hospitals rationing basic supplies. In response, Ghana’s government has pushed policies favoring local manufacturers, and companies such as Intravenous Infusions have positioned themselves as beneficiaries of that shift. Zagadat’s entry into the stock is being read by some analysts as a bet that this policy direction, combined with rising regional demand for locally produced medical supplies, will support the company’s recovery over time.
The company behind the ticker
Intravenous Infusions Plc is not a startup chasing hype but one of Ghana’s oldest industrial names. Incorporated in 1969 and based in Koforidua in the Eastern Region, the company began operations in 1974 as the first manufacturer of intravenous fluids in West Africa, a milestone once significant enough to be covered by international newsreels. It has been listed on the Ghana Alternative Exchange since December 2015 under the ticker symbol IIL and remains one of the region’s largest private employers, with a workforce of more than 150 people.
Its products, regulated by Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority and the Pharmacy Council, are used across public hospitals, the Ghana Armed Forces medical corps and mission hospitals nationwide. Despite that legacy, the company’s most recent annual report showed a difficult financial year, with revenue falling sharply and a net loss driven by working capital constraints and debt servicing costs, the very conditions that appear to have opened the door for outside investors like Zagadat to build a position at a depressed share price.
What happens next
Zagadat Capital has stated that Intravenous Infusions will continue operating under its existing management, with the fund positioned as a significant minority shareholder rather than a controlling one. Whether Mr Eazi’s team eventually secures a board seat will depend on the company’s articles of association and a vote from existing shareholders at a general meeting, a process that has not yet been confirmed publicly.
Zagadat has left open the possibility of increasing its stake further, while also signaling it may simply hold the position as a long-term investment rather than seeking a quick exit. For now, the transaction stands as a rare example of Nigerian private capital flowing directly into a Ghanaian public company through an open exchange, without the currency controls or regulatory friction that often complicate cross-border deals within West Africa.
A wider pattern of celebrity capital
Mr Eazi’s move also reflects a broader trend of African entertainers redirecting royalty and touring income into equity positions across the continent’s smaller, less liquid stock markets. Where earlier generations of musicians invested primarily in real estate or their own record labels, a newer cohort is buying into publicly listed manufacturers, fintech firms and even sports franchises, with Zagadat Capital previously taking a stake in South Africa’s Cape Town Tigers basketball team.
Analysts who track the Ghana Alternative Exchange note that the board has historically suffered from low trading volumes, meaning that even a modest amount of fresh capital from a high-profile name can move prices sharply, as the run-up in Intravenous Infusions shares demonstrated. Whether that liquidity holds once the initial attention fades will likely determine whether this becomes a durable turnaround story for the pharmaceutical maker or simply a short-lived spike driven by celebrity interest.
How the exchange itself works
Understanding why a single investor could move the stock so dramatically requires some background on the Ghana Alternative Exchange itself. Set up as a junior board of the Ghana Stock Exchange, GAX was designed to give smaller and less capitalized companies, including family-run manufacturers like Intravenous Infusions, access to public capital markets without meeting the stricter listing requirements of the main board.
That lighter regulatory touch has helped a number of homegrown Ghanaian firms raise funds over the years, but it has also meant thinner trading volumes and wider price swings than investors would find on more established exchanges. In a market where a single day’s turnover can be measured in a few thousand cedis, an accumulation of shares the size of Zagadat’s stake was always likely to leave a visible mark on the price chart, and that is largely what played out between May and July.
Public reaction and scrutiny
News of the returns spread quickly across Ghanaian and Nigerian social media, with commentators highlighting the scale of the paper gains and framing the trade as a case study in reading undervalued assets ahead of the crowd. Mr Eazi himself engaged with some of the commentary online, responding lightly to speculation about what might happen to the share price if Zagadat eventually sold down its position. That kind of public engagement is unusual for a substantial shareholder in a regulated pharmaceutical company, and it has added to the sense that this transaction sits at an unusual intersection of celebrity culture, retail investor enthusiasm and industrial policy.
Financial commentators have cautioned that a rapid, publicity-driven rally on a thinly traded board can reverse just as quickly as it began, particularly once the underlying company still needs to address the working capital and debt pressures flagged in its own annual report.
For Mr Eazi, the investment closes a personal loop that began not in a boardroom but in a hospital corridor. Whether it ultimately reshapes Intravenous Infusions Plc’s fortunes will depend on factors far beyond one shareholder’s intentions, including Ghana’s broader push for pharmaceutical self-sufficiency, the company’s ability to convert renewed investor confidence into an actual operational recovery, and whether the current wave of attention translates into steadier, longer-term trading on the exchange where the shares are listed.
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