Africa’s richest man and Chairman of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote has assured that following laid down plans of the Dangote Refinery, Nigeria as a nation will have no need to import gasoline from next month.
export them, when you export raw materials and somebody now keeps importing things into your continent and dumping goods. what you are importing is poverty and exporting jobs out. So, we have to change that narrative,” he said.
“We just commissioned in February and now we are producing jet fuel, we are producing diesel and by next month, we will be producing gasoline. What that would do is that we would be taking most of the African crude that are being produced and also be able to supply not only Nigeria, because our capacity is too big for Nigeria, but it would also supply West Africa, Central Africa and also South Africa. We have 650,000 barrels per day, 1 million tonnes of polypropylene, we have 590,000 carbon black, that is the raw materials ink, dyes and co. We are expanding more. This is the first phase and we are going out to the next phase which will start early next year.”
The richest man in Africa also acknowledged the challenges faced in building the refinery, particularly from those accustomed to the status quo.
He said there was pushback but failure was not an option, even though many people did not believe he would succeed.
“The pushback was very impactful because there are people who have actually been used to just making money trading without refinery and you know, to get people who are committed to Africa has to be people that believe in investing in Africa because the companies that are operating today are actually not investing, and some of the issues of stopping that investment is going to impact us, not today but in the future, which means our oil production will continue to go down because in oil, unless you keep investing, the production is going to go down.
“So, that is the issue. The major burden on us was that there is no room for failure because we were the EPC contractors and ninety percent of people never believed that we were going to deliver but we have been able to deliver now.”
Despite these achievements, Dangote identified policy inconsistency as a major challenge for African entrepreneurs and called for a review and support from the leaders to ensure proper ease of trading in the continent.