Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, says some powerful people in Nigeria’s fuel import business tried to stop his $20 billion refinery. He believes they were afraid the refinery would end Nigeria’s dependence on imported fuel.
Dangote made this statement in an interview with Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. He explained that these groups resisted the project because it threatened their business of importing petrol into Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer.
Dangote said he decided to build the refinery because of Nigeria’s long history of fuel shortages. “For more than 50 years, Nigerians have queued for fuel, sometimes for days during Christmas, in a country that produces oil,” he said. Since government refineries were not working well, he started building Nigeria’s first private mega-refinery in 2013.
The project faced many problems from the beginning. Getting the land alone took five years. Dangote also said some of the delays were caused on purpose by powerful people in the oil industry who wanted to keep the old system.
Building the refinery was also very costly and difficult. When the project started, $1 was equal to ₦156. Later, it rose to ₦1,900, but work continued. No Nigerian port could carry equipment weighing up to 3,000 tonnes, so Dangote’s team built a new port. They also built roads, water facilities, and a water treatment plant on 30 hectares of land to supply 440 million litres of treated water for the refinery.
Even with these challenges, Dangote said his goal was to improve energy security for Nigeria and Africa. At its peak, 67,000 people worked on the project. The refinery got funding from Afreximbank, African Finance Corporation, and Nigerian banks like Zenith, Access, and UBA, as well as Standard Bank and Standard Chartered.
Looking back, Dangote said he was lucky not to know how big the project really was at the start. “If I had known from the beginning, I might have given up,” he said. “It was like swimming across an ocean. Once you are in the middle, you cannot go back, so you keep moving.”
The refinery is now expected to reduce Nigeria’s need for imported fuel and help save foreign exchange.