Many years ago, Aliko Dangote called out some newspaper editors and other senior journalists to lunch at the Sheraton Hotel. It was his birthday and thought of sharing some of his time with newsmen on the day.
As the event closed, a newspaper publisher was asked to give a vote of thanks. The publisher challenged the journalists to open their minds, and to accept the idea that the government’s stranglehold on the downstream petroleum industry and the resulting wasteful spending on fuel subsidy was unhelpful. As a case in point, he noted that many had collected a license to build an oil refinery, but no one was investing in consummating the license.
The publisher said you had to be mad to build a refinery in such an environment. Dangote snatched the microphone and said in response, “I don’t know what you mean by being mad, but I want to announce that I am going to build a refinery in Nigeria. If Nigeria is not ready to take the refined products, I will sell them to the rest of the world.”
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since that audacious move. From the initial delays in obtaining the refinery license from the then Goodluck Jonathan’s government to finding a location and raising capital to covid pandemic delays, the 650,000 barrels a day refinery is now ready for commissioning on May 22.
Dangote is launching the refinery which is the largest single train refinery on May 22 this year and it could be the answer to Nigeria’s perennial reliance on imported petrol
Days ago, Dangote himself spoke of how his well-oiled and curly grey hairs are not just about ageing. And he is well placed to speak about challenges. At a small briefing addressed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on the sidelines of the world economic forum in Davos before the covid pandemic, Dangote and Kunle Elebute, the immediate past managing partner of KPMG had joined together to make the point that governments in Nigeria should do more than merely celebrating intentions by private investors to embark on big projects by working with the investors to debottleneck the process of making the big projects come alive.
At an event last week, the richest billionaire in Africa opened his heart to relay the monumental challenges he has faced to build the refinery.
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Dangote is launching the refinery which is the largest single train refinery on May 22 this year and it could be the answer to Nigeria’s perennial reliance on imported petrol.
He said, “When you are faced with these challenges, something happens to you. In fact, I developed all my grey hair in the last four years. “When he is done, the total turnover of his companies will be in excess of the GDP of Ghana but the journey has been arduous.
“A lot of people just talk about our refinery but don’t know what we went through,” Dangote said. “First of all, to make the land suitable because of climate change, we had to raise the land by 1.5 metres but then when you talk about land is it just land no? Our land is 7 times that of Victoria Island (VI).
“VI is 458 hectares, our land is 2,780 hectares. So it was not land and we had to bring in the three biggest dredging companies and we pumped from the sea and we have a lot of hassle getting environmental, getting approval from the Ministry of Environment.”
He added, “We had to pump in 65 million cubic metres of sand and it took us 18 months. Our CDU is the second biggest which is 2780 tonnes. Our biggest equipment is 3,000 metric tonnes- that is 3,000 cars in one location and the cranes to lift that are 5,000 tonnes cranes which there are only two available in the world.
“So, when we hired that one, we had the delay and despite the cost, we had to detain that one here and pay an infinitive charges fine. In our CDU alone we had to do 13,000 pipes. We wanted to do storage to store 440 million litres of water and we had to do 18,260 pipes.
“We went round the world hiring people with rigs and at the end of the day, we bought our own rigs. People who were doing granite and chips quadrupled their prices waiting for Dangote to come into the market, but we had already planned ahead of them. You know Nigerians. So, what we did was to go and create a capacity of 10 million metric tonnes which is more than the entire capacity of Nigeria in Ogun State where we are mining. 800,000 metric tonnes per month.”
The cranes and equipment coming into the site by sea were oversized. Dangote said he had engaged the Nigerian Ports Authority to break the gate of the port in order to move the equipment out of the port in Lagos.
“At first, we were in discussion with the Nigerian Ports Authority to break their gate but on second thought, it will expose everybody but then we got stuck,” he said.
“We learned more that the infrastructure in Nigeria is almost nothing when it comes to mega projects.
“We had to build a specialised port which was for roll-in and roll-out ships. So, that is how we were able to bring in these equipment.”
According to the businessman, “we knew what we were targeting, and our target is by the time we finish all these, and we get to our own capacity, we will move our total group revenue from $5bn to $27bn which is equivalent to Ghana’s GDP.”
