He is Africa's richest man and the billionaire behind the continent's largest oil refinery. Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote's latest venture has reshaped his country's fuel sector. For decades, Africa's biggest oil producer spent billions of dollars importing refined petroleum products because its state-owned refineries were barely functioning. Since starting operations two years ago, Dangote refinery has helped Nigeria reduce its reliance on imported fuel and it's also supplying refined products to other countries. Aliko says the facility is a milestone for Africa, but building it was the most challenging task of his life. The refinery reached its full capacity in February shortly before the Iran war and it's seen an increase in demand for its jet fuel due to disruptions to global energy supplies. We are making history. Now the company is going public, listing its shares on the Nigerian stock exchange with plans to double its processing capacity. I am Ahmed Dre at the Dangote Refinery and Petrochemicals Company in Lekki, Lagos. An entrepreneur with a vision who built one of the world's biggest refineries started business with a family loan that took 3 months to repay. He would go on to become the world's wealthiest black person. While many consider him to be a businessman unafraid to take risks, some others accuse him of using his influence to maintain a monopoly on the market. Aliko Dangote, Nigerian entrepreneur, billionaire and president Dangote Group of companies talked to Al Jazeera.
The president of the group, Aliko, welcome to talk to Al Jazeera.
Thank you. Great to be here.
Let's start with the refinery and the why. A lot of people would think at the time you came up with the idea of this refinery, you must be the richest man in Africa. Why were you going into such a big project?
Well, I think Africa has actually never seen a project of this scale. And I think I always believe that we Africans were the only ones that can actually take Africa to the promised land. So trying now to say okay why would we try this project, it's not only that why we try the project, we also did what has never ever been done before anywhere on earth, that is building a single train. We targeted to produce, to build 50% of the biggest single train in refining business. Going back to even your question, yes, it's true. When you look at it, Nigeria, we were actually number seven in oil before. I don't know what number we are right now. We have been having fuel queues since 1973 and these fuel queues refused to go and we have actually been able to build even up to four refineries. After a while those refineries couldn't even work. So I thought of it as okay how do we really address this issue because energy is the real heart of the economy here. We tried before and which I'm sure you are aware of, we bought three out of the four refineries during President Obasanjo.
What happened after that?
Well after that the then late President Yar'Adua came in and he had one engineer, Ado Bayero, they are from the same place, not the same family, and he assured him that no, these refineries were just given to us for free. You know we paid $750 million anyway, which Shell rejected to even take them for $1. And he promised him that they work within 90 days. They have never worked till today since.
So the contract was revoked.
No, it was revoked. The sale was revoked. We lost money, you know, in the sense yes, because all our advisors, the bankers, everybody was paid their own fees. We paid for the loans, we paid all the lawyers, you know, Clifford Chance, all of them were paid, we paid them. The deal was done, consummated, but they did not hand over. Unfortunately for us, before he left, they were not there, wasn't anything like handing over because it was transition from the same political party. But he says no, you know, can he? So I wrote a letter that okay fine, take them back and if you are not able to run them then return them back to us. So after that, I still didn't give up. Now I called a company called Jacobs in UK and designed 300,000 barrel refinery.
So, so the cancelling of that sale ignited the passion?
Ignited me that yes, I know that it wasn't really question about stopping us because I was very close to him, but I knew that the same mafia who are still fighting us till today.
You talked about them severally.
Yeah, there is a, there are real mafia. You know, there are mafia that, there wasn't the mafia that are doing drugs. The ones doing drugs are not as lethal as these ones here.
Let's talk about the challenges you faced. Was it structural? You spoke about the mafia. Now, what about the construction of the refinery itself? Was that a big challenge as well? And talk about the normal usual challenge.
It's not the most challenging thing in my entire life. First of all, we had human challenges where we bought a free trade zone where we supposed to build a port and also build the free trade zone for other users not only us. And it was blocked by the then governor of Ogun State, you know, for 3 and a half years, you know, when Governor Amosun, and you know, we didn't really move, he didn't see the benefit of building something like this in the state. So we gave up three and a half years, we couldn't do anything because there's no way even people who will do the detail engineering will do anything. Now we took the money, the money that we took from the banks was actually paid into Guaranty Trust Bank and we ended up paying interest on money that we were not using because it was put in an escrow account for us to start using. So both our money and that money was locked up 3 and a half years. We finished, we came down to here in Lagos and you know, we bought another land for $100 million. But that same land too we couldn't really enter into the land for almost a year and a half. Actually the manager who was running the entire zone was killed right there. The shortim community later on, things were sorted out, we were able to now go into the land and then to our biggest shock and surprise the land was a marshy land where we were shown was a place called Lekki Free Zone and we thought the land was as good as that. We got in there, over 70% of our land, only in front of it is okay, once you go it's a marshy land where we had to do what you call debushing, the debushing of removing the trees one by one because otherwise they will sprout again. It took us 8 months. Then climate change, when you check climate change, Lagos is one of the cities that's supposed to go under the water. I'm giving you just few of them. We have to now brought in three biggest dredgers in the world and pump 65 million tons of sand to be able to raise the land by 1 and a half meters. So that took us 18 months. We finished that one. We had to also build a road which could take 3,000 tons of one single item because our roads will not take that. They will sink. So we built that special road. We had to build a port to be able to receive those huge equipments.
Was there a point where you thought maybe I should give up on this?
No, there is actually, it's like what I said, you know, it was an Atlantic Ocean which we have here that I was trying to cross and any time when I go forward then I realize that look I've actually gone so far. So turning to go back wasn't even the case. But I know that a lot of people try to make sure that we don't achieve what we have achieved so far. You know, some of there was a bitter fight in fact from the old, not even just people who even have no reason to fight. They were fighting because you know, it was a business that people were looting over 10 billion every year because it was subsidy. So people were just writing numbers. GMA was busy paying, sweating at the same time but we came and you know, over...
Yeah, we disrupted everything, you know, yes.
And you suspect it's a deliberate effort just to frustrate?
Well, well, it is an effort that everybody wants to have piece of the action, you know, so that's how it is. But you know, we are where we are right now. I think we fought them hard, they've seen that we have succeeded so now things have come down. Of course, you still have little flies that will come and try to disturb us, you know, but we're good.
