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The Africa's richest man and chairman of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has declared that Nigeria will no longer need to import petrol from next month following the plan set by the Dangote refinery.
Dangote also said its refinery will be able to meet West Africa's gasoline and diesel needs, as well as the continent's aviation fuel needs.
Speaking at the Africa CEO Forum annual summit in Kigali on Friday, he expressed optimism about the transformation of Africa's energy landscape.
“At the moment, there is no reason for Nigeria to import anything other than petrol, and within the next four to five weeks, during June, Nigeria should stop importing things like petrol. We don’t even have a liter,” he explained.
He also outlined the oil majors' progress in making Africa as a continent self-sufficient in the energy sector.
He said: ``At least we have enough gasoline to supply all of West Africa, and we have enough aviation fuel to supply West Africa and Central Africa.'' They also go to Brazil and Mexico.
"Today, our polypropylene and polyethylene meet all of Africa's needs, producing base oils like motor oil and producing linear benzyl, a raw material for detergents." No one in Africa does it. Not produced.
``Therefore, all the raw materials for our detergents are imported. We produce this raw material to make Africa self-sufficient.
``As I said, we will give you three years or up to four years. Once again, Africa will not import fertilizers from anywhere else. We will make Africa self-sufficient in potash, phosphates and urea.
We currently have 3 million tons of urea and will have 20 more to come. We will be self-sufficient in producing 6 million tons of urea, which is Egypt's entire production in a month. We are getting there.''
Dangote went a step further, with the refinery coming online in February. He explained the company's performance since then.
“We had this dream about five years ago and said we wanted to go from $5 billion to $30 billion in sales, and we did it. It's possible and now we're doing it.
“Our refineries are so big that we think Africa needs them.If you look at the entire continent, we don't import petroleum products. There are only two countries: Algeria and Libya. The rest are all importers,” he said.
“One of the things we also need to know as Africans is that we produce raw materials and 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. So, we have to change that narrative.”
“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 is 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,” he said.
The richest man in Africa also acknowledged the challenges faced in building the refinery, particularly by 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 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 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 per cent of people never believed that we were going to deliver but we have been able to deliver now,” he added.
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.
