Dangote refinery renews legal war with Nigeria over fuel import permits

Aliko Dangote’s $20 billion refinery has launched a fresh legal assault on Nigeria’s government over fuel import licences, reigniting one of Africa’s most consequential corporate battles and raising new questions about who controls the continent’s largest oil market.

Dangote Petroleum Refinery filed a new lawsuit against Nigeria’s attorney general at the Federal High Court in Lagos, seeking to annul import permits recently issued or renewed by the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters.

The filing argues the licences, granted to the Nigerian National Petroleum Company and several independent marketers, breach an existing court order to preserve the status quo and violate legislation that restricts imports to periods of domestic supply shortfall.

The move comes less than a year after Dangote abruptly withdrew a nearly identical lawsuit in July 2025, offering no explanation for the retreat.

That quiet exit had left investors, traders, and policymakers in suspense over whether the billionaire industrialist had reached an informal accommodation with authorities or was regrouping.

Read also: Dangote’s London listing tests the ‘Nigeria discount’ 

The answer, it now appears, is the latter.

“The licences issued this month undermine our operations and contravene the law,” the refinery said in its filing, arguing that domestic capacity has grown sufficiently to render blanket import authorisations both unnecessary and unlawful.

The NMDPRA did not respond to requests for comment. Nigeria’s attorney general’s office also did not immediately reply.

The lawsuit thrusts back into the open a tension that has shadowed Nigerian energy policy since Dangote’s refinery, located on a 2,635-hectare site on the outskirts of Lagos, began processing crude in 2023.

Designed with a nameplate capacity of 650,000 barrels per day, the facility was widely heralded as the infrastructure investment that would finally end Nigeria’s peculiar and costly dependence on imported refined products despite sitting atop vast crude reserves.

That dependence has proved stubborn. State refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna have operated at a fraction of their combined 445,000-barrel-per-day capacity for years, forcing Nigeria, a founding OPEC member, to spend billions of dollars annually on imported petrol, diesel, and jet fuel.