Godwin Emefiele's Speech at Dangote Refinery Inauguration: A Vision for Nigeria's Economic Growth

The President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari. Your Excellency, other presidents here are present. His Excellency the President of Ghana, His Excellency the President of Senegal, His Excellency the President-elect of Nigeria, represented by the Vice President-elect and my brother, Senator Kashim Shettima. The President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives represented by the Deputy Speaker, the Executive Governor of Lagos State. And please, at this point, let me just stand on already established protocol. Good morning to you all. I am immensely delighted to be here today to witness this historic occasion which marks a significant accomplishment for Nigeria's foremost industrialist, Dangote, the Dangote Group, as well as our beloved nation Nigeria, and indeed the entire continent of Africa. Today, our history is being rewritten. Nigeria's trajectory for greater growth and prosperity is enhanced as we inaugurate Africa's largest refinery, the Dangote Refinery, alongside its petrochemical plants. I must commend Aliko Dangote and his team for their tenacity and unwavering commitment in completing this project despite the various challenges they have faced. More importantly, please permit me to congratulate and thank President Muhammadu Buhari for his unrivaled leadership, vision, and support in ensuring that this significant project, which exemplifies the President's effort towards building a more productive economy, was completed during his tenure as President. Mr. President, sir, it is on record that when the NNPC was created in 1977, you were the corporation's first chairman and shepherded them into the business they are today. As Federal Commissioner of Petroleum Resources, you completed and commissioned Nigeria's only oil refinery in Warri in 1978, while significantly improving the readiness of the Kaduna Refinery, which was also commissioned in 1980. Mr. President, you have not only superintended over the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, you led the efforts towards the finalization and enactment of the Petroleum Industry Act, a law that had eluded many presidents before you, sir. Your Excellency, over the last eight years, your far-reaching vision and deep knowledge has also been instrumental in the tremendous growth of the consumption phase of this refinery for which we are here today. Mr. President, today your name goes into our annals of history to yet again commission the biggest single-train refinery in the world, in Nigeria. Your Excellencies, as you are all aware, this complex comprises a refinery, a petrochemical plant, a urea fertilizer plant, and a subsea pipeline project. It has a capacity to produce 900,000 metric tons of polypropylene per annum, while urea will be able to produce 3 million metric tons of urea annually. Its flagship project, for which you are here today, the Dangote Refinery, which has the capacity to produce 650,000 barrels of crude per day, is the largest single-train refinery in the world. Given its pre-processing capacity, this refinery is more than able to meet all of Nigeria's domestic fuel consumption, whilst the excess production will be available for export. This will not only aid our domestic production needs but also help in generating export revenue for our country. The refinery is designed to process not only Nigerian light crude oil, it can also process a wide range of other crude streams, including many from Africa, some Middle Eastern streams, and the US WTI light. Your Excellency, in September 2013, Dangote announced his plans for a refinery. It was estimated to cost just about 9 billion dollars. By 2017, when the Dangote Group commenced this project, the project had escalated, and due to an array of factors, the project was eventually completed today at a total cost of 18.5 billion dollars, with a contribution of 50% equity investment by Dangote and 50% debt financed by our banks. I am delighted to announce, Your Excellency, that the commercial loan component of the project was financed majorly by our domestic banks, with a balance sourced from foreign banks. The Central Bank of Nigeria also partnered, as always, with Dangote in ensuring the successful completion of this project by providing over 125 billion naira to cover domestic currency requirements for the venture, while also ensuring the availability of foreign exchange to pay for the importation of some of the plants and machinery being commissioned today. Your Excellencies, we have it on good authority that the Dangote Group has paid down some portion of this commercial loan even before this commissioning today. As at today, total loans outstanding have dropped from over 9 billion dollars when this project started to 2.7 billion dollars today. Please pardon me that I have to reveal numbers here. This reflects the attitude, creditworthiness, and commercial capability of the group and its chairman, Dangote. Your Excellencies, please permit me at this juncture to appreciate all the participating local Nigerian banks who did not only partner with the project through effective financing, but were keenly aware of the importance of the project to our country. They provided immense support and exceptional understanding, even when interest and principal payments were almost overdue. They were patient with the Dangote Group. Mr. President, I must thank you for your astute vision to ensure that Nigeria produces what we consume and that we consume what we produce. And this is one. This refinery and petrochemical project is a testament to your vision for Nigeria. It shows that regardless of what the world says or thinks, Nigeria can be self-sufficient in all products that we consume, and at the same time export our excess output to the rest of the world. Your Excellencies, please permit me to recall the events leading to Nigeria's eviction from the JP Morgan index in 2017 following their pessimism of Nigeria's economic outlook and our ability to take charge of our fortunes. At that time in 2017, we had explained the ongoing efforts to diversify our economic base through import substitution and export promotion strategies to attain sustainability and self-sufficiency. Our friends that we spoke to abroad were very skeptical, saying that Nigeria typically crafts brilliant policies that could engender diversification but lacked the ability to fully implement them. Even when we insisted that under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari, that the ongoing project and effort will be actively implemented to diversify the economy and make the country globally competitive, they still doubted us. Aside from enumerating our strategic efforts in agriculture and other critical sectors, a key project that we highlighted to our foreign investor community was this project, the refinery. Your Excellencies, they doubted us. They doubted our willpower to succeed. Your Excellency, I could appreciate their skepticism because they do not understand how a single individual, a man like Dangote, could build a refinery capable of serving an entire nation and continent. To them, our foreign friends, projects of this magnitude are usually only undertaken by sovereigns, not individuals. But like Nelson Mandela once said, 'It always seems impossible until it is done.' It is with extreme delight that I say that President Mandela's quote has come true for us in Nigeria. The impossible has today become possible. I am glad that we never doubted ourselves as Nigerians and our capabilities under your leadership, Mr. President. This family-owned, attainable project, perfected and completed, will correspondingly, under the incoming administration of President Bola Tinubu, ensure that Nigeria seizes the important petroleum products, fertilizer, and petrochemicals that drain over 26 billion dollars in foreign exchange in 2022. The self-sufficiency in refined petroleum, urea, and polypropylene, which Nigeria has attained with this project, is a strong testament to our leadership, dedication, focus, and commitment. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, the takeoff of this refinery comes with numerous economic benefits to Nigeria. In the first instance, it will generate thousands of direct jobs, of over 135,000 permanent jobs. I am also proud to say that electricity of about 12,000 megawatts of electricity is to be generated. More importantly, this project avails Nigeria with significant savings both in terms of foreign exchange and in the fiscal burden of our federal government. Available data at the Central Bank of Nigeria as of 2014 shows that at least 30 percent of the foreign exchange required to meet Nigeria's import needs went into the importation of refined petroleum products. It is interesting to note, distinguished leaders, that the balance of payments, including freight of petroleum products imports into Nigeria, doubled over a five-year period from about 8.4 billion dollars in 2017 to 16.2 billion dollars, including an annual average of 11 billion dollars, before rising further to 23.3 billion dollars at the end of 2022. At this rate, the average annual cost of petroleum products import to Nigeria could reach 30 billion dollars by 2027 if we continue to rely on petroleum imports. Figures, Your Excellencies, suggest 13 billion dollars annually. Aside from the nearly 30 billion dollar foreign exchange savings from the reduction in petroleum products imports, the economy is projected to benefit an extra 10 billion dollars of foreign exchange inflow annually from the export of refined products. This project will equally provide some fiscal savings for the federal government, which is currently constrained by funding petroleum subsidies. And these fiscal savings, Your Excellencies, the Dangote Refinery is a blessing to Nigeria and Africa as a whole, given the favorable spillovers from this project are expected to spread from Nigeria to other parts of the world. It is in this regard, Your Excellencies, and consistent with the federal government's drive to diversify the economy, that the Central Bank of Nigeria, through its various development finance interventions, has continued to support critical sectors of our economy to promote a homegrown balance rebalancing of our economy and foreign exchange sufficiency. For instance, in the last seven years, the CBN has injected over 8 trillion naira to support different sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, health, education, just to mention a few. Your Excellencies, before I leave, just one more minute. He says this is a revelation. Dangote said that I am one person who has visited this project site more than any of his own staff. The revelation is this: when this project started, we were doubted by foreigners, by our friends. Anytime we traveled abroad to discuss Nigeria's economic outlook, when we used the Dangote Refinery as a lifesaver and an opportunity for diversification of our economy, they doubted us. When I returned back to Lagos, 'Are you sure this project will work?' He says, 'It will work. Let's go to the project.' So we go. I go around, I conduct interviews with television people, and I just say to myself, 'It will go. It will happen.' I go back again, the same story comes up. But I am saying for me today, history is made in Nigeria. The credit goes to you, Mr. President. We thank you very much, and I believe that this is a long-lasting legacy that you take away as you bow out from being the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Thank you.