Like the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon to confirm what she had heard about the king in relation to his unmatched wisdom, senior media practitioners were in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria, last Sunday on the tour of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals complex. They were stunned at what they saw.
They found out that most writers who had ever written anything about the project from the outside did not know up to 30 percent about the iconic refinery.
The visit lasted over 10 hours. The guests were conducted around every corner of the massive complex, which occupied 2,635 hectares of land, about seven times the size of Victoria Island, Lagos. It is located in the Dangote Industries Free Zone, away from the Lekki Free Zone, which is owned by the Lagos State Government.
The Visioner and business Czar, Aliko Dangote, Group president; Edwin Devakumar, Group vice president, Oil & Gas, and Fatima Aliko-Dangote, Group executive director, Commercial, ably conducted the media personalities around the complex.
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The first port of call was the Land Fall Point (LFP) facility. Here the guests were shown the single point mooring (SPM) location situated 25km offshore.
Edwin Devakumar said: “Twenty-five kilometres from here into the ocean, we have our three single point moorings (SPM), where ships discharge crude oil into our subsea pipes.”
The convoy moved to the port and quays constructed by DIL with a load-bearing capacity of 25 tonnes per square metre to bring heavy and large cargoes close to the site to handle liquid cargoes.
A guest wanted to know the total length of all the pipes that crisscrossed the refinery, hazarding it could run into thousands of kilometers, Devakumar said: “Yes. “We are inviting Guinness World Records to register it.’’
At this point, Dangote added, “They will have to come and audit it before they register and announce it.”
Devakumar also explained: “This is the world’s largest single-train refinery, with the capacity to process 650,000 barrels of crude per day. It will meet all of our needs for refined products, with enough for exports. It is a game changer.”
From there, the train moved to the fertilizer factory that has the installed capacity to produce three million metric tons of urea yearly, making it the second largest plant in the world. Devakumar however, explained that the plant is currently producing at half the capacity due to inadequate gas supply.
Dangote said that the fertiliser plant was the largest in Africa and the second-largest in the world. According to him, Nigeria consumes one million metric tonnes of fertiliser per year, meaning that the plant is able to meet local demand while the excess is exported to the United States of America Brazil, and other countries.
From the fertilizer plant, the guests were ushered into an elaborate conference room, where the visioner gave a briefing on his businesses, from inception; his transition from commodity trading in the 70’s, to a well-diversified conglomerate comprising cement, crude oil and gas exploration, agriculture, fertilizer, and petrochemical refineries.
The Group Chief Branding and Communications Officer, Dangote Industries Limited, Anthony Chiejina, had, before yielding the stage for the remarks by Dangote and Edwin, introduced the media executives, throwing banters with some of them, whose professional relationship with him has spanned several decades. It was a reunion of sorts!
The briefing at the conference room was essentially to prepare the guests for the wonders that lay ahead at the refinery.
First, it was the tour of the Laboratories and the central control room.
The media executives were conducted around the laboratories where the refinery carries out all categories of analyses.
Speaking to the guests, the knowledgeable staff, populated by GenZs, explained with great mastery, the workings of the equipment and other aspects of the Labs. They also informed the visitors that most of the equipment in their Labs cannot be found anywhere else in Africa, and that what they have are more sophisticated than the ones found in Saudi Aramco, which is easily one of the world’s largest integrated energy and chemicals companies.
The refinery itself is a wonder to behold with a maze of huge steel pipes.
The refinery is operated by a new generation of engineers, populated by Nigerians. They are within the ages of 26 and 30. Some of them served as our tour guides. While inside the buses conveying the guests around the complex, they were explaining, at every point, what each of the installations does.
Many of the young engineers and Lab minders have advanced degrees up to PhD. They schooled in Nigeria. While some of them have had additional training outside the country on the job they do, some said they were fresh from the university after their mandatory one-year national service. They appeared very enthusiastic about their future in the firm.
This enthusiasm is bolstered by the acknowledgment of their principal, Dangote, that they must be paid a living wage in order to be retained.
“We believe in the young ones. We have a system where we train them and enroll them in different programmes locally and abroad. They are highly skilled and motivated. Some of them have PhDs, you’d be surprised,” he told his guests.
To hedge against the ‘japa’ syndrome, Dangote said: “We pay our employees well and increase salaries very often. However, we know we can still lose some of them to foreign countries or international oil companies (IOCs), no matter what we may pay. We created a pipeline that ensures we hire the brightest minds from Nigeria universities.”
Among this highly skilled manpower are civil engineers, mechanical engineers, oil and gas specialists and Chemical engineers.
The refinery currently has about 30,000 workforce and large percentage of this are Nigerians. The figure will go up to 100,000 as production ramps up.
“The plant will meet all of our domestic demands for liquid products (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and aviation fuel). Currently, it is producing diesel and aviation fuel; petrol will be pumped out next month,” Dangote said.
Inside the complex are lots of tank farms for various purposes.
Dangote informed his guests that the fertilizer, petrochemical, and refinery businesses would be quoted on the Stock Exchange in or before the first quarter of 2025 in what could be one of the biggest initial public offerings (IPOs) in recent years and that the NNPCL has only a 7.2 percent stake in the refinery, not 20 percent, as was earlier being reported.
“Although we had offered them 20 percent, they could not pay for all of that, and so we had to reduce it to 7.2 percent, which they paid for,” he said.
He spoke on the politics and economics of crude oil supply from the NNPCL, the $100 million payment to the Lagos State government; why he did not build the refinery in the Niger Delta region, which is the nation’s hydrocarbon base; why Ogun State lost out as the initial location choice; why he has no home outside Nigeria; and his plans to reconstruct the Lekki Expressway.
On what makes the refinery unique, Dangote said: “The location at the Lekki FTZ gives it a logistics advantage relative to imports; ready access to the West Africa and Latin American markets, and proximity to Nigeria’s largest market for petroleum products.”
He also that the “refinery’s configuration significantly enhances its economics by minimizing production of low value products (eg, LPFO) and incorporating flexibility to allow swing to more profitable crudes and products.”
Dangote further mentioned “scale” as a unique point. According to him, “The large scale minimizes production costs and provides ability to serve a large market.”
In her vote of vote of thanks, Fatima Aliko-Dangote also corroborated the words of some people who had described the Refinery as the 8th Wonders of the World. She praised her father’s can-do spirit, drive, energy, commitment, and matchless love for Nigeria.
Ken Ugbechie, who used the opportunity to present his book, ‘Nigeria Heroes and Sheroes,’ in which Dangote was also featured, was to script later on his Facebook wall: “He occupies a huge space in the agora of global wealth creators. Dangote charms you with his simplicity, humility and benign smile. A genuine pathfinder and value creator, he has birthed hope across the continent. In reality, Dangote is not a rich man, he’s a WEALTHY man. Selfless, visionary, perceptive, passionately patriotic, he’s the reason many young Africans, especially Nigerians, have not abandoned their home countries for jobs abroad, which sometimes is a life of untold servitude.
“Dangote believes so much in building Nigeria and Africa economy. He does not own a house anywhere in the world except in Nigeria; but he has made men and women who own choice houses in Dubai, Europe and the Americas. He’s both book-smart and street-smart, a combination that keeps him on top of his game in all his businesses.
“A true hands-on man, he knows the littlest details about all his businesses. And they are many. May the Almighty God keep blessing and preserving this man who genuinely represents the Nigerian Spirit of derring-do, boldness and indomita.”
Femi Otedola, the billionaire businessman, had in December 2023, said of the refinery: “The Dangote Petrochemical Complex, which consists of the world’s largest single-train 650,000 barrels per day Petroleum Refinery, a 1 million metric tonnes of Polypropylene per-annum facility, and two of the world’s largest Fertilizer Trains – with a capacity of producing 3 Million Tonnes of Urea – is much more than just an industrial milestone; it’s a testament to the visionary leadership and relentless pursuit of excellence of one of Africa’s finest and most dogged patriots.”
The take away
The tour left many media executives crest-fallen about their country, Nigeria. They wondered aloud: “If one man could pull off the wonder that sits at Ibeju-Lekki, how is it that successive governments and administrations since 1999 have not been able to even, as much as, turn around the existing refineries in the country?
The moribund Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited (Ajaokuta Steel Mill) in Kogi State, also came to their mind when they saw that the refinery was over 85 percent steel work and all imported at a huge cost in foreign exchange. They said to one another, “Had the Steel Company been up and running, would Dangote have looked elsewhere for steel? The money spent outside to bring in those steel materials would have gone into the Nigerian government’s purse. That remains the sad story of Nigeria all round!”
