Aliko Dangote went from schoolyard sweets to Africa's largest oil refinery
At eight, Aliko Dangote bought boiled sweets and resold them to classmates, keeping the profit. He later started trading with a 3,000-dollar loan from an uncle. Today his cement, sugar and refining empire makes him Africa's richest person, and his Lagos refinery, commissioned in 2023, is the biggest on the continent.
Dangote was born in Kano on 10 April 1957 into a Hausa family already steeped in commerce. His great-grandfather on his mother's side, Alhassan Dantata, traded kola nuts and groundnuts and was reckoned the richest man in West Africa when he died in 1955. After a madrasa and secondary school at home, Dangote studied business at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, then went to Lagos to make money.
In 1977 he founded a small firm importing sugar, salt and food. Timing helped. Nigeria in the mid to late 1970s authorised imports of roughly 16 million tonnes of cement for its building programmes, and so many cargo ships queued at Lagos that some reportedly sank while waiting. Dangote secured an import licence, bought a fleet of lorries to haul the cement, and by 1981 had widened into textiles, flour, oil and gas, and property.
Rather than keep importing, he began making things. His Lagos sugar refinery grew into the second largest anywhere, and after privatisation in 2000 opened a state cement works to him he built a cement business that faced off against the French giant Lafarge. His plant at Obajana in Kogi State became the biggest in sub-Saharan Africa, and Dangote Cement brought in about 3.7 billion dollars of revenue in 2023.
The scale draws criticism. Rivals complain they cannot match his resources or his apparent favour with governments, and the refinery has raised fears of a stranglehold on fuel supply, sharpened by reports of tax breaks. Time magazine counted him among the world's 100 most influential people in 2014, and he has given money to fight Ebola in 2014 and COVID-19 in 2020.
Source: Aliko Dangote
