This year is arguably the year of trade wars. Tariff turmoil and attendant threats formed a familiar pattern. Though more of a war that never was, the bully in President Donald Trump led the execution of widespread tariffs and retaliatory measures, holding the global economy to a standstill.
The global trade trauma did not belie actual wars in parts of the world. The Russo-Ukrainian war smoulders in Europe, the Israeli-Palestinian war lingers, and Jihadists wreak havoc in the Sahel, killing many and holding thousands hostage. The collateral damage on troops became the uniform alibi for military juntas to attempt and topple democracy in more West African countries.
Globally, the Trump-led administration’s “Grievance Doctrine” culminated in the announcement of sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, with rates reaching a trade-weighted average of 18.3 per cent, the highest level since 1934. These tariffs extend to a wide range of partners, including China, the European Union (EU), Canada, Mexico, and Asian countries. The reciprocal actions made trade conflicts a new normal, leading to economic disruption and a re-evaluation of global trade architecture.
Within Nigeria, it was a state of warfare on all fronts. The country was technically at war against age-old Frankenstein monsters of corruption, drug abuse, electricity shortages, public asset stripping, the oil debacle, insecurity and terrorism, a wobbling economy, poverty, and the overarching misfortune of mismanagement and incompetent leadership.
Despite the disruption and turmoil, one battlefront has a clear-cut success. It is the hard-won battle over the anomaly of import dependence for every litre of fuel consumed in oil-rich Nigeria. The private sector’s delivery of the world’s largest single-train Dangote refinery saves Nigeria’s blushes at a time of trade turmoil and high expectations for Africa’s response to global trade-offs. As moderate as the achievement may seem, it is psychological, material, and mercurial in essence.
The federal government-owned four refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna had been running for decades with a combined capacity of 445,000 barrels per day. Opacity, sabotage, and a substantial sum of over $25 billion in routine turnaround maintenance couldn’t rev up at least one operation to meet a fraction of the daily consumption of over 50 million litres in Nigeria.
Riding on the full deregulation of the oil sector (PIA) and the “subsidy is gone” mantra, Dangote Refinery Limited demystified the public sector bureaucracy and the perception that running a refinery is rocket science. In 2025, the many years of building the Dangote refinery paid off. Locally refined petrol and diesel were dispensed. With it comes a national pride and excitement that swept across the land. But with success came new battle fronts, including price wars, standoffs with establishments, and booby traps, attendant confusions, palpable tensions, twists and turns, hues and cries, and intriguing drama that followed the incredible Dangote refinery story.
But more than anything else, the Dangote effect had a profound impact on all Nigerians. Replacing fuel imports with locally refined products saves the country more than N10 billion yearly in foreign exchange. For once, Nigerians saw all the fuel scarcity and Christmas’ long queue rituals vanish. The icing was Dangote’s incessant price modulations – love or hate the new monopolist in the oil sector! The perception among the masses, whether fuelling a car, a danfo, an okada, or an I-beta-pass-my-neighbour generating set, is that of one man – Aliko Dangote – standing on the side of the poor. For the honeymoon or a long-haul marriage, Dangote presents himself as the economic saviour who has built an energy sanctuary to dispense subsidised salvation to the pockets of impoverished masses that the government could not reach.
More than just Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote is a defining figure in Africa’s contemporary industrialisation and economic narrative. He has locally reshaped key sectors of the economy. Continentally, he has redefined the scope of African entrepreneurship.
Hence, for waging that industrial war and touching Nigerians where it has hurt the most in 2025; for igniting a foundry of belief, hope, and fury of an energy-secured Nigeria, and still emerge smelling of roses; for leading the Africa-for-Africans industrialisation era, and spicing it all with a touch of human benevolence and kindness, the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, is The Guardian Person of the Year 2025.
Dangote: A name for every home and season
The choice of Aliko Dangote is expected. Just pause for a moment and think of one Nigerian who has triumphed through grit and guts in the quest to profit from hard work; who blazes a trail that changes the course of normal living, touching all Nigerians differently, and has etched a footprint in pursuit of a legacy. Aliko Dangote has ticked those boxes.
He is not an accidental entrepreneur. Born in 1957 into a prominent Dantata family and raised by his grandfather, the then richest man in West Africa, Aliko was bred in trade and commerce. This background exposed Dangote to the logic of markets, capital accumulation, and long-distance trade at an early age. He studied Business Studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, an education that combined formal training with the mercantile instincts he had already developed.
He started trade with a loan from his uncle. It was the foundation of what would become the largest business conglomerate in Africa – the Dangote Group in 1977. “I always tried to move up the food chain,” Dangote said. “I started with cement, and then moved into textiles, and banking. When I was trading sugar, I added salt and flour, so that we could do pasta. And then I thought, why not make the bag for it too? So, we started making packaging.”
Dangote’s transformation from trader to industrialist scaffolds his metamorphosis into Africa’s richest man. It was the pivotal turn in his fortune—and in Africa’s industrial story—that came when he embraced backward integration: producing locally what Nigeria had long imported. Unlike many elites whose wealth derives from finance, oil rents, or state contracts, Dangote pursued large-scale industrial production, especially in cement, sugar, salt, flour, and later petroleum refining and fertilisers – all fast-consumer items in every home and season. Rarely is a Nigerian home that does not have essentials under the Dangote brand—such as Dangote Salt, Dangote Sugar, and Dangote Pasta—or a Dangote sack, at the very least.
The cement venture became the cornerstone of his fortune. A shrewd interplay of government patronage, market knowledge, and its free dominance shot Dangote Cement into the mainstay of the real sector. He invested heavily in backward integration—producing cement locally rather than importing it. This strategy aligned with the policies of the President Olusegun Obasanjo-led government that restricted cement imports and encouraged domestic production. It became Dangote’s strength. He built massive plants, invested in infrastructure, and created economies of scale that made his cement competitive across Africa.
Dangote Cement expanded into multiple African countries. Imagine branded Dangote Cement trucks snaking across the interiors of Ethiopia, Senegal, Tanzania, and as far as South Africa. It is real, making it the largest cement producer on the continent. This pan-African industrial footprint transformed Dangote from a Nigerian businessman into a continental economic actor. His wealth grew not merely from monopoly advantages, but from volume, vertical integration, and long-term capital investment—features rare in African business environments characterised by uncertainty and short-term players.
Dangote Refinery: A promise kept
If the foregoing sounds all too familiar, the Dangote Refinery and product rollout aptly qualify as the wonder of 2025. It started as a dream in September 2013, when Dangote announced that he had secured about $3.3 billion in financing for the project. At the time, the refinery was estimated to cost approximately $9 billion, with $3 billion to be invested by the Dangote Group and the remainder to be financed through commercial loans, with production expected to begin in 2016. It started with a single ultimate objective in mind: to locally and sustainably produce PMS and diesel – a jinx almost as old as the country’s independence.
The project aims to end Nigeria’s paradoxical dependence on imported fuel despite being a major crude oil producer. If fully successful, the refinery could save Nigeria billions in foreign exchange, stabilise fuel supply, and reposition the country as a petroleum exporter rather than importer.
But that is still the easiest part. He continues to contend with a higher hurdle in mounting the loops of ‘establishments’ and the ‘oil mafia’ that have overseen the decades of the oil resource curse and remain intransigent to change. For instance, there is a cabal that has made fortunes, some of them legitimate, from the importation of refined products and has held both the government and the economy by the jugular for ages. Similarly, the shortsighted oil business model of the federal government runs on crude-for-loans agreements that have pledged future extractions to creditors. It has little or no crude feedstock for new entrants like Dangote Refinery, without a breakthrough in efforts to rescue and scale up production from the claws of saboteurs and insecurity. Lastly, the sector is known for powerful unionism and regulatory booby-traps.
Put together, the refinery turned out to be the biggest risk of his life. “If it didn’t work, I was dead,” he quipped in a recent interview. Yet, as an entrepreneur born and made for high-stakes deals, Dangote drew strength from self-belief: “I have been fighting battles all my life, and I have not lost one.”
Sited on a 2,500-hectare site at the Lekki Free Trade Zone, Lagos, the refinery is supplied with crude oil by the largest sub-sea pipeline infrastructure in the world (1,100 km long). Experts reckon that the facility houses one of the most sophisticated refineries in the world, with the dynamic capacity to adjust to all qualities of crude oil supplies – a strategic edge above the crude oil allocation politics.
In May 2023, when it opened, the ambitious Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Complex was valued at over $20 billion in investment. The transformative project is one of the world’s largest refineries. At 650,000 optimum capacity, it is the seventh largest after the likes of Jamnagar in India, Paraguana in Venezuela, Ulsan in South Korea, Ruwais in the UAE, Yeosu and Onsan both of South Korea. Yet, with a single crude oil distillation unit, the refinery will be the largest single-train refinery in the world. It dwarfs Saudi Aramco’s 430,000 barrels per day capacity. When fully operational, it will create 135,000 permanent jobs in the region.
The size mirrors the energy security it offers. At full production, the facility will process 650,000 barrels of crude oil daily, transported via pipelines from oil fields in the Niger Delta. Natural gas will also be sourced from these fields to supply the fertiliser factory and be used in electrical generation for the refinery complex. This corresponds with 50,000,000 litres of Euro-V quality gasoline and 17,000,000 litres of diesel daily, as well as aviation fuel and plastic products. With a greater capacity than the total output of Nigeria’s existing refining infrastructure, the Dangote Refinery targets meeting the country’s entire domestic fuel demand, as well as exporting refined products.
In 2025, amid the price wars, fighting regulators and unionists tooth and nail, Dangote Refinery sustained local consumption. Stakeholders have, however, deemed concentrated faith in a single tank farm source as traditionally risky, if not economically suicidal, for a large country like Nigeria. Undeterred, Aliko Dangote on October 26, 2025, announced plans to expand the refining capacity of the Dangote refinery to 1.4m bpd – the largest refinery ambition in the world.
The Dangote industry effect
The landmark effect of these projects lies not only in their scale but also in their structural impact: they change the narrative by addressing the oddly familiar systemic weaknesses in African economies, talking of their age-long energy dependency, low industrial capacity, and fragile value chains.
Dangote has played a central role in import substitution, changing Nigeria’s odd status as an oil-rich import-dependent country. Nigeria historically relied heavily on imports for basic goods such as cement, sugar, and refined petroleum products. Dangote’s investments reduced foreign exchange outflows, strengthened domestic production, and contributed to a more diversified economy.
The Lagos facility, which produces fertiliser, diesel, jet fuel, and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) among other products, therefore portends a national economic and industrial liberation – stemming from its dedicated capacity for 2.34 billion litres of refined products, including petrol, diesel, and aviation fuel, as well as the storage tanks.
The result is a significant reduction in reliance on fuel imports, saving the country an estimated $25–$30 billion yearly in foreign exchange. That shift has helped stabilise the Naira, which has gained modest ground against major currencies for the first time in years. Also, by exporting surplus refined products to neighbouring West African nations, the refinery has created a new stream of foreign exchange earnings, contributing to a rare surplus in Nigeria’s balance of payments in early 2025.
Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Yemi Cardoso, stated that lifting petrol from the refinery can turn around Nigeria’s dollar-starved economy. “This is also expected to moderate foreign exchange demand for importation of refined petroleum products, with a positive spillover on external reserve and improvement in the overall balance of payment position,” he added.
Beyond Nigeria, Dangote’s influence extends across the African continent. His success similarly challenges the assumption that Africa must rely on foreign multinationals for large-scale industrialisation. The immediate past president of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, had lamented Africa’s export-import substitution of wealth for poverty by ‘giving away’ raw materials to first-world industries. Adesina said: “Africa accounts for 75 per cent of global cocoa production but reaps only two per cent of the profits from the $100 billion annual market for chocolate. Transforming cocoa into chocolate will significantly increase revenues for cocoa exporters. And this is just for cocoa – the same logic applies to oil, iron ore, platinum and manganese, among others.”
That narrative is fast changing due to the Dangote effect. His cement plants and industrial investments in multiple African countries contribute to regional development, infrastructure expansion, and intra-African trade. In this sense, Dangote embodies a practical vision of Pan-African economic integration, not through political rhetoric but through bricks, factories, logistics, and supply chains. Dangote’s model also reshapes the way African entrepreneurship is perceived. He shows that African business success need not be confined to small-scale enterprises or resource extraction. Instead, Africa can produce industrial champions capable of competing globally while remaining rooted in local economies.
Dangote demonstrates that the renaissance of African capital, when strategically deployed, can build globally competitive enterprises and a cure for local poverty. On oil and fertiliser alone, the Lagos facility is estimated to account for over 570,000 direct and indirect jobs, created through the refinery’s operations and its wider value chain, including logistics, supply services, maintenance, and construction. President of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission, Dr Omar Touray, therefore lauded the refinery as a “beacon of hope for Africa’s future”. Further driving the entrepreneurial spirit across other mineral resources across the continent will deliver the Africa of our dreams.
After all, the Dangote Refinery demonstrates the active role government policies play in the sink-or-swim fate that befalls entrepreneurial spirit, and a reason to pay closer attention to it. Arguably, Dangote, among others, benefited immensely from government support and patronage across various administrations. It culminates in setting the policy barometer in a favourable protectionist direction for indigenous operators to thrive.
For instance, Dangote, among others, is a beneficiary of the local production of cement policy under the Obasanjo administration. Besides the 10-year tax-free period, he reportedly benefited from the forex subsidy era in the building of the refinery. Similarly, the Naira-for-crude concession is a mode of subsidising the production end to make petrol affordable. These are standard practices for encouraging ‘your own’ in the feisty modern industrial system and nurturing them to flourish. It is both an indicator of the government’s relevance in our successes and the trust to be reposed in the Nigerian system, despite all odds.
Indeed, Dangote is an inspiration for the emerging entrepreneurial spirit. Since its opening, the Dangote Refinery at the Free Trade Zone in the Lekki-Epe corridor of Lagos has been a Mecca of sorts. ‘Pilgrims’, including presidents, ministers, public and private sector members, well-oiled individuals and journalists, have routinely flocked to the wonder of a modern industry. What many would remember is Aliko Dangote’s down-to-earth persona and extensive knowledge in personally guiding the ‘pilgrims’ on a tour that often lasts over five hours across the vast hectares. In one sentence, Dangote knows his business!
He is a model of hands-on immersion in a chosen line of trade or career. He is a man who knows his onions and is almost always available. Curiously, he recently informed the media that the refinery incurred losses of $82 million due to theft, resulting in the dismissal of a “small number of workers” for repeated acts of sabotage. “You should go and ask all the people who have even built the modular refinery. I challenge any one of them to say that nothing was stolen,” he said. What would have happened if he had not been hands-on and religiously available to commandeer the ‘warfare’ of his own vision?
Aliko’s consistency and attendant fruition of his profound spirit of innovation and capability have placed him in the ranks of legendary figures in various global industries. For over 12 years, Aliko has consistently topped the Forbes Billionaires Index as Africa’s richest man, establishing a stature that elevates him above his business contemporaries. His journey transcends a mere narrative of financial achievement; it unfolds as a compelling saga of ambition, resilience, transformative leadership, and a phenomenal inspiration for a national spirit at its lowest and a pillar of light for the emerging generation of African entrepreneurs.
Lastly, Aliko tries to give as much as he gets. Worth $24.7 billion, Africa’s richest man has given back through the Aliko Dangote Foundation (ADF), which was endowed with $1.25 billion in 2014. Beneficiaries, old and young across the continent, tell of the lifesaving measures in health (especially child nutrition), education, and economic empowerment across Africa, making it the largest private foundation in sub-Saharan Africa, with significant investments in anti-malnutrition, disaster relief, university funding, and scholarships, aiming to foster social change and leadership.
Most recently, he launched a N1 trillion National Scholarship Programme for Nigerian students, starting in 2026, with a commitment of N100 billion yearly for 10 years to support 1.3 million vulnerable learners in public schools. He has a motivation for his philanthropy. “My mother instilled in me the ethos of giving back, which inspired my philanthropy 30 years ago. I want to be known not just as Africa’s richest person but also as its biggest philanthropist,” Dangote said.
Energy security: Not too big to falter, fail
The Dangote Refinery is a powerful testament to what can happen when ambition, capital, and execution align in the right place at the right time. Yet, it is rarely the silver bullet for the complicated Nigerian oil sector and its toxic environment.
Dangote’s self-preservation measures have been criticised as monopolistic and a winner-takes-all capitalist approach. “Mr Dangote asked me to stop issuing licences for importation and that everyone should buy from him. To which I said ‘No’ because it’s not good for the market. We have energy security interests,” says the former chief executive of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), Farouq Ahmed. He further accused Dangote of “wanting a Lamborghini for the price of a Toyota”, when the matter of Dangote’s crude oil importation was broached.
Amid Dangote’s pushback on low-quality fuel importation, other stakeholders could not fathom why a single and “heavily subsidised” operator should control the entire downstream value chain, encompassing production supplies (actual refining, blending, or both), storage and distribution of all the essential oil end products. The refinery is a single-train refinery that puts the entire country at risk in the event of downtime due to turnaround maintenance or a major accident.
Despite this comprehensive underwriting and the purchase of cheaper and allegedly low-quality crude from overseas, Dangote’s petrol is believed to still cost more than the imported variants, which are also accused of being of low quality. Critics are quick to recall a similar trajectory with cement, noting that in June 2016, the World Bank published a report examining the impact and costs of a lack of competition in several industries in Africa. They found that African cement prices averaged $9.57 per 50kg bag compared with $3.25 globally. Put another way, Africans, especially Nigerians, paid 183 per cent more than people around the world for the same product. His latest financial year report showed a current gross profit margin of 59 per cent in Nigeria. The World Bank report also showed that Dangote had exclusive mining licenses for limestone and other additive materials for cement, estimated to last for 90 years, despite its cement plants having an estimated life of 50 years.
Yet, in between the mud-slinging battle for the soul of Nigeria’s energy security, it is evident that all parties are playing games and have something to hide in the opaque oil sector. It is rarely a place for the sitting administration to take an innocuous stand against or carpet the regulator just to satisfy the whims of an operator. On the contrary, it is time to strengthen the regulator, with a mandatory requirement for fairness, accountability, and transparency.
The soft-spoken Aliko Dangote has routinely denied wanting to be a monopoly, and the system should believe him. What is expected of the federal government is to encourage more private investments in the oil and gas sector, as well as to enforce its competition law. The NNPCL should be asked to actualise its ongoing plan to sell ownership and control stakes of the four government-owned refineries to private investors. Three of those refineries have a high chance of coming upstream. It should be maximised. Other privately owned refineries should be fairly supported in the interest of good competition and sustainable energy security.
Above all, even critics would concede that Dangote has delivered tangible industrial outcomes where many others have failed, and in doing so, has cemented his place in African history. The lingering ‘wars’ are not Dangote’s to fight; rather, of the State’s and those entrusted with the apparatus of power to conscientiously use it to protect the Nigerian public, thereby ensuring that such industrial power contributes to inclusive growth rather than excessive concentration of wealth.
•Drs Adekoya and Oyebade are members of the Editorial Board.
