Dangote outlines $20bn planned investments in Nigeria

Africa’s richest man and Nigerian business magnate, Aliko Dangote has outlined a five-year investment plan that that will spur industrial and economic growth in the country.

Dangote who disclosed this at a presentation to business leaders/CEO’s at the Lagos business school last week, said the group has planned over $20 billion investment for Nigeria that will help drive key infrastructural growth and improve economic activities.

“Of the $23 billion investments in the works, $11 billion will go to refinery, $3 billion to the gas pipeline (EWOGGS), $2.2 billion to fertilizers, $2 dollars to power, and $1.8 billion to upstream oil, $1.3 billion to cement projects, $1 billion to rice production and $1 billion to sugar backward integration.”

“The EWOGGS pipeline project will significantly improve gas supply security for use by power plants, fertilizer production and other industrial factories as current national supply is put 1,000 mscfd.”

With a capacity of 3,000mscfd of gas and covering a distance 550 km from Bonny in the Niger Delta to the Lekki Free Trade Zone in Lagos, the EWOGGS pipeline project will supply Nigeria enough gas to generate 12,000 MW of power.

The project’s feasibility and concept selection study is now completed and currently at the detailed engineering phase. Geophysical (route) survey and geotechnical survey are equally in progress, Dangote said.

According to Dangote “the group is growing rapidly with revenues expected to grow by more than 7 times in the next 5 years from $4 billion to $30 billion.”

“The group is also driving 6 major projects which will provide FX earnings and savings of $15.5billion. They are expected to create over 290 thousand jobs in Nigeria.”

The refinery and petrochemical project is the single largest refinery in the world with a 650,000 bpd refining capacity sited on 2100 hectares of land located at the Lekki Free Trade Zone.

The Dangote group is the largest conglomerate in West Africa and one of the largest on the African continent that has grown from a commodity trading company to a diversified conglomerate over the last two decades.

The group has invested over $7bn in the last 15 years largely in the manufacturing sector which is almost 10% of the total Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows of $77.12 billion which was mainly channelled into the oil and gas sector between 2013 and 2016.

Of the $7 billion that has been invested, the Obajana cement plant contributed the most with some $2.5 billion investment, followed by Ibese Cement plant with an investment of $2 billion.

Investment in transport came next with a $1bn investment while investment in Gboko cement plant, Dangote sugar and other investment (Dangote Flour Mills and NASCON) stood at $750 million, $520 million and $290 million respectively.

The group’s revenue in 2016 was equivalent to 11% of the manufacturing sectors contributions to the Gross Domestic Sector, based on data from the National Bureau of statistics.

The group has also contributed immensely to scaling up employment opportunities in the country, spending closely N2 billion yearly on corporate social responsibilities (CSR) as over 1,000 persons (engineers, technicians, artisans) have been trained by the Dangote Academy with 70 percent absorbed into the Group.