By all standards, the commissioning of the Dangote refinery and petrochemical project after almost 10 years since the dream was conceived is a phenomenal statement on the fact that nothing is impossible if we will draw to dream, set our minds to doing it and putting in the hard work to make it happen.
At the commissioning of the project, the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, recalled how guys at JP Morgan had received with cynicism his pitch about Nigeria’s plans for diversification of the economy through import substitution and export promotion strategies, panning the idea of a single individual building a private refinery capable of meeting Nigeria’s need for refined products as unattainable, as such projects are for sovereigns and not individuals.
The project is a huge statement in sheer audacity. It is situated in a land area of approximately 2,635 hectares, which about the six times the size of Victoria Island, Lagos. It comprises of a 650,000 barrels per day refinery, a petrochemical facility with capacity to produce 900,000 metric tons of polypropylene per annum, and urea fertilizer plant with capacity to produce three million metric tons of urea annually.
For Dangote, the mantra seems to be, ‘anything worth doing at all is worth doing on a grand scale’. For him, it does appear that it has to be either history-making or not at all. “My story is the story of a man and a brand Nigerians have come to know, to love and to accept…In all modesty, we can say we have done very well. There is no business that we are in and we are not No. 1. The worse one that we have, maybe we have a second position. That in itself is our business strategy.
But it was with the turn of democracy in 1999, specifically in 2002 that Dangote made the switch that was turned his life around from being just another Businessman, content with simply angling for profit, to one that might be labelled as development-minded, now paying more attention to growing the local economy through targeted investment in different sectors.
By 2003, Dangote began the construction of the Obajana cement factory, the largest cement plant in the world. From zero in 2000, Dangote had expanded capacity to 20 million metric tonnes in 2009, with Nigeria attaining self-sufficiency in 2012 with excess being exported.
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