For the smaller entrepreneurs, there is nothing. And I believe that if you know what you are doing, you believe in God, you are very consistent — just do what is right. What is right is that you should concentrate on your business and big pleasure — let me correct it — big pleasure, they don't go together.
Because if you are going to be having fun, that fun will not give you that mileage to be where you want to be. And the priority is: do you want to really have a very luxurious life, or do you want to build an institution and leave a legacy? If you choose one, then you can. Like what I told some people that came with His Excellency Mr. President to my house, and one of them said, 'This is a very nice house.' I said, 'Well, I feel comfortable in it, but I've been in this house for 36 years. I haven't changed a house in 36 years, and I've not even changed an office in the last 26 years.' So the issue is that if I'm looking for luxury, then I should be in the south of France by the beach.
But if I really want to leave a legacy, I want to make sure that I make my people in the continent of Africa proud to be Africans, then I have to sacrifice myself and make sure that I work hard. Not that I will not rest — of course I do rest. I have a hobby. I mean, the entire yesterday, one of my hobbies is to be around my friends, my grandchildren. I took them out yesterday, we spent the whole day yesterday, and that's a very good satisfaction. But you know, the issue is that if I'm going to be almost everywhere, then I will not be able to establish a big corporation.
But for you, is it possible to be like Dangote? No, you can even be bigger than Dangote. Because I started in 1978 when I was just a distributor. I was selling four trucks of cement in 1978, but making good money because at that time I wasn't an importer — I was actually a domestic trader. So you can be bigger than Dangote, but just be consistent, work hard, know what you want to do. You must be very focused in what you are doing, but enjoyment does not go along with building a big business.
Because we are all Africans, the problem with us is that sometimes as an African, when you now calculate that, 'Hey, look, I'm going to make $10 million every year,' now you start spending even that 10 million before making it. So we have to be very, very careful. It can be done. Today, some of our banks believe that they are at this level; tomorrow it can be a different story.
I mean, you look at it now — we have a very big bank that was set up by multinationals, call it AfDB, for example. If we were to rely on AfDB, we wouldn't be able to grow as a continent. But luckily for us, the same AfDB created a prison bank, and then people with a vision like President Obasanjo created the African Finance Corporation.
I sat down with Somaya just on a flight and said, 'Look, Sam, if you should participate in our fertilizer growth...' He said, 'Okay, so what do you want us to contribute?' I said, 'Whatever you can.' He said, 'Okay, is 600 million good?' I said, 'Yes.' Everything from start to finish within six weeks, that $600 million was in our account.
So if I was going to talk to Bank X based somewhere, we would actually be up to now discussing — in fact, it would be next year before they asked me for my feasibility studies. So we have to be very careful, but I'm sure our young upcoming entrepreneurs will have a better opportunity than people like us, because when we were building our own plants, our banks, especially in Nigeria, they are very, very small. The capital of those banks, the highest was 25 million naira, you can see, and we took up a project of a billion.
So that's what it is. In fact, to give you a story, when we went to IFC, we actually got — well, it's a long story — but we were able to get $478 million, our first foreign loan. It was actually the person that dropped it was Samu. And I even asked him one time, I said, 'Somalia, are you sure these people will give us the money?' He said, 'Well, we have nothing to lose by trying.' And we were very lucky, we got the money.
So we were able to pay down the local banks. Because of lack of capital at that time, we had to be very ingenious in terms of, 'Okay, fine, how do we make it?' We were funding the project with 90-day commercial paper, and you know how much interest we were paying? 44%. Yes, but we even wrote to them that we will be able to pay this loan. 'Please just give us the money. We'll pay the loan in three years.' They said it's impossible.
They did their financial modeling and told us that we need two years. They said even two years we will not be able to service the interest. But that did not deter us from carrying our project through. We went ahead with our project. Their money came in 2026.
No, 2006. Sorry, 2006. But we commissioned the factory in 2007, May, because Obasanjo insisted on commissioning before he left office. So we commissioned it two weeks before he left office. But you know, the seven-year money they gave us, we were able to pay all their $478 million in 18 months.
So sometimes when you do this sort of thing — I'm saying this because of the entrepreneurs that are here — when you do all these things and somebody tells you that, 'Look, this thing is going to take you a long time,' some of them really are doing it to discourage us Africans from doing what is right. Don't be discouraged. And I volunteer myself: any question that you have, you want to be helped, you want me based on our own experience — we are here to help and tell you whether what you are doing is right, because we know a lot. We've gone through a lot. We know what it takes, and we'll give you free advice because the more the merrier. We want to make sure we Africans take Africa out of this poverty.
And then let us now partner with our governments to make sure they too relax the movement of people, goods and services. We'll continue to push for that because I cannot see why somebody who is holding a British passport or a European passport will move easier than me as an African. This thing will have to stop, and it will be stopped soon.
