The business story
Aliko Dangote is a Nigerian industrialist whose fortune rests on unglamorous goods: cement, sugar, salt, flour, fertiliser and, most recently, refined fuel. He has been Africa's richest person and, according to Forbes, the world's wealthiest Black person for most of the period since 2008. His career is a useful corrective to the idea that large fortunes must come from new inventions or open markets.
Dangote treats scale as a strategy rather than a reward.
Before the Dangote Group
Dangote was born in Kano, northern Nigeria, in 1957, into the Dantata family, one of West Africa's most established trading dynasties. His great-grandfather Alhassan Dantata was counted the wealthiest man in West Africa when he died in 1955. Commodity trading surrounded him from childhood, and he has described running small resale ventures as a schoolboy. He later studied business administration at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
That inheritance matters for reading him accurately. He began with two things a newcomer cannot easily get: a trader's instincts absorbed early, and access to credit through a trusted family name.
Building the Dangote Group
In 1977, by his own account, Dangote borrowed money from an uncle and began trading commodities. For years the business imported the staples Nigeria consumed but did not make in volume, including cement, sugar, salt and rice. Importing taught him the size of domestic demand, how the supply chains worked and how much margin was flowing to foreign producers.
The decisive shift was backward integration: making locally what he had been importing. Around the turn of the millennium he bought Benue Cement through privatisation and opened a large sugar refinery in Lagos. He acquired the Obajana site in 2002, and the plant there was commissioned in 2007 as the biggest in sub-Saharan Africa. Dangote Cement listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in 2010 and became its most valuable company. The same template was then carried to roughly 17 African countries.
His largest project is the Dangote Refinery near Lagos, designed for 650,000 barrels a day and the largest single-train refinery in the world. Its cost rose from early estimates of around $9 billion to roughly $19 to 20 billion, and it has faced crude-supply problems and open disputes with the state oil company and rival importers.
