DANGOTE: BUDDING SOUL OF AFRICA’S ECONOMY


Let me tell you this and I want to really emphasize it…nothing is going to help Nigeria like Nigerians bringing back their money. If you give me $5 billion today, I will invest everything here in Nigeria. Let us put our heads together and work.” “I want to be remembered as Africa’s greatest industrialist”. Aliko Dangote

CHOOSING Aliko Dangote as The Guardian man of the Year was not an easy assignment. The choice, when juxtaposed with various personalities and macabre events that dotted the year 2015, was bound to be tasking. As 2015 drew to a close, it did so by birthing sundry reflections about its most remarkable event or events at both national and international levels. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) chilling attacks on human and physical structures in the Middle East and terrorists’ foray into continental Europe evoked the worst nightmares about human tragedy. Hapless refugees from the civil war in Syria streamed into an unprepared Europe in ways that were testy for the Maastricht Treaty underpinning the European Union. A Russian combat aircraft was shot down by a NATO-buoyed Turkey over its border with Syria which raised fears of a global conflagration.

In Africa, tales of woes proliferated. The ‘third term’ or ‘unlimited tenure’ quest by African leaders has acquired a new intensity undermining true democracy. Burundi’s President Pierre Nkuruziza who, after a decade in office, altered the constitutional term limit typifies this trend. His action renewed bloodletting in a deeply polarised country while expanding the continent’s misery. Towering Museveni of Uganda, Joseph Kabila of Congo DRC and Paul Kagame of Rwanda swelled the list of sit-tight African rulers.

In Nigeria, the joy of an electoral turn over in which an incumbent was defeated in office was somewhat tamed in the country’s simmering under the horrendous onslaught of the Islamic insurgents, Boko Haram. Throughout the year, its suicide bombers and combatants gave citizens in the north east a harvest of sorrow and sleepless nights. Part of the narrative is that the insurgency was spawned by unbearable poverty afflicting the people in the area. Truly, poverty is not an exclusive preserve of any part of the country. Nigerians have been impoverished over the years by mindless policies of its governing class. Since its insertion into the global political economy on the basis of cash crop production under the colonial arrangement and the subsequent replacement by crude oil, the country has not left the margins of poverty; and its governing elite have not managed to transform the country into an industrial giant.
Instead, they entrenched a rentier state and its attribute of external consumption.

Despite a steady growth rate averaging about five percent, complementing the latest sing sung about ‘Africa Rising’, there is the paradox of youth unemployment amidst a monoculture economy. The need to diversify the economy remains a slogan. Constitutional strictures which are more unitary than their proclaimed federal ambience hedge regional initiatives to diversify the economy and unleash productive competition. This obvious lacuna is being filled with franchise and patents from the West. The wealthy elite are so by virtue of primitive accumulation, not genuine productive activities; they ponce off the state and warehouse the money in some off shore accounts, leaving the country and the continent worse off. Thabo Mbeki Committee on illicit financial flow revealed recently that about $50 billion dollars leave the continent annually. This is more than the aids often promised on the side-lines of G7 summits and other multilateral platforms.

The continent’s predicament requires entrepreneurs that can jump start Africa’s industrial production taken by the industrialised world since the 1760s. Rich private individuals, who made it through the state, cannot advance productivity through manufacturing, in ways that are backward integrating; nor do they provide employment opportunities for the idle population in the continent. As three Harvard professors, namely, Bryan Mezue, Clayton Christensen and Derek Van Bever have observed, most narratives of economic growth often focus on local and international conditions and incentives that are conducive for growth. Natural resources, population, political culture and government policies feature in that account. But they averred that: “it is not societies, governments, or industries that create jobs but companies and their leaders. It is entrepreneurs and businesses that choose to spend or not, invest or not, hire or not”. Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian entrepreneur chose to invest in his country and the entire continent in ways that African ancestors who dreamt of continental unity would turn in their graves in a twinge of fulfillment.
In a culture in which phenomenal success is most often rooted in narratives of destiny and fate, two legends rank high in the story of Aliko Dangote’s meteoric rise to become Africa’s one-man economic superpower. One story attributes Dangote’s entrepreneurial skills to genetic endowment. Born into a family of iconic entrepreneurs from both the father and mother sides, Dangote was said to have vaguely expressed his business acumen in primary school days, when he allegedly bought Nicco sweets in packs and resold in pieces to peers for profit. Another fable is a revisionist tale, which attributed Dangote’s octopodial expansion to showers of ‘anointing’ from prophetic impartation. Dangote was said to have boarded a plane with his personal assistant, whereupon then popular tele-evangelist, Benson Idahosa, came to plead with passengers to vacate their seats for some foreign guests who needed to get to the United States urgently. In the capacity-full aircraft, only Dangote and his aide volunteered to vacate their seats. And in gratitude, Idahosa was said to have blessed him and prophesied his phenomenal growth; and ever since Dangote has soared.

Whether or not there is truth in any of these legends is a matter for historical conjectures. What is clear is that for too long, external influences have shaped Africa’s socio-economic and political destiny to a point of underdevelopment. In defiance of this calamitous trend, some African business persons have determined, beyond money-making, to reposition African economies towards unprecedented growth and development. Among them are Mohammed Ibrahim, a well-respected businessman and telecommunications giant of Sudanese extraction, who sought to encourage leadership and economic development in Africa by richly rewarding good governance with prize-money valued at about $5 million for this purpose.

Others include Christoffel Wiese, a veteran businessman and one of the richest people in South Africa with a net worth of $3.5 billion, who serves as Chairman and the largest single shareholder of Shoprite, Africa’s biggest retailer, low-priced supermarket chain; Mike Adenuga, oil and telecommunications magnate, whose net worth is estimated at $4.7 billion according to Forbes; and Zimbabwe’s richest man, Strive Masiyiwa, who is said to be quietly connecting the continent, with underground fibre optics cable through his company, Liquid Telecom.

What makes Dangote stand out is his clear, unmistakable vision of an economically renascent Africa; an Africa whose often talked about potential needs to be realized from the scratch for its transformation. To accomplish this, he must cultivate an uncommon mission to take a leap from being a businessman to become an economic leader through service-oriented entrepreneurship. He must transmute from personal profit-making to public prosperity. When Dangote started building his business empire, his primary focus was on the importation and distribution of commodities – sugar, rice, vegetable oil, steel rods, pasta, cement as well as exportation of agro-based commodities, reinforcing the peripheral-metropole relation.

The eye-opener that jolted him into manufacturing was a visit to Brazil in 1997, where he saw another Third World country similar to Nigeria, with huge manufacturing complexes providing jobs for its citizens and developing the country’s economy. As Devakumar Edwin, the Group Executive Director, Strategy, Portfolio Development and Capital Projects, Dangote Industries Ltd, highlighted: “We started with a strategy of backward integration, investing in manufacturing of the products that were being imported and traded by us”.

From being the largest importer of spaghetti and macaroni from Italy, Dangote decide to manufacture pasta locally. To manufacture pasta one needed wheat flour; and so Dangote went into flour milling. From being the largest importer of sugar in the world, he went on to build a sugar refinery. From being the importing monopoly of cement, with its ancillary businesses, he set up a cement terminal, and later went into cement manufacturing having acquired renowned comatose cement companies. Realizing that these commodities – flour, sugar, salt, cement – needed polypropylene bags for packaging, Dangote went on to set up a polypropylene bag manufacturing complex. So phenomenal was Dangote’s rising business profile that at the turn of the millennium, the Dangote Group had “ended up having the largest flour milling capacity in the world, the second largest sugar refinery in the world and the second largest pasta plant in Africa.” Added to these are series of value chains that traverse agriculture, transport, and real estate, among others.

At this stage of economic prosperity, many a businessman would have reached a cul-de-sac in his projection. But for Dangote, it was just another beginning. This new beginning, courtesy of his characteristic astuteness, was revealed by the lacuna identified in construction, real estate and agriculture. Considering the fact that Africa was gradually becoming a dumping ground for cement by multinationals, whose investments were domiciled in Asia and the Far East, Dangote’s patriotic capitalism took the better of him as he became Africa’s Bridger of the cement demand-supply gap.

Consequently, the prospect of sub-Saharan Africa being the potential food basket of the world led Dangote into agriculture and investing in fertilizer. With such investment, the Dangote Group hopes to set up a fertilizer plant with a capacity of three million tonnes per annum. And because natural gas was the feedstock for fertilizer, Dangote ventured into the downstream oil and gas business, and is setting up a huge petro-chemical complex. The complex would have the largest petroleum refinery in the world, with a capacity of 650,000 barrels per day. Considering the first-rate quality of its refined products comprising petrol, kerosene, diesel and jet aviation fuel, there would be prospect of exportation to Europe and supplies to West African countries.

Not done with the majestic impression created in Nigeria, Dangote commenced a pan-African expansion drive of the Dangote Cement Plc. This drive stemmed from Dangote’s conviction that “Africa’s future growth is intrinsically linked to cement”. About three months ago, precisely in October, Dangote added Tanzania into the league of Africa’s indigenous cement manufacturing countries when he commissioned a 3 million metric tonne per annum plant in Mtwara, South Tanzania. Before then, in June 2015 he commissioned a 2.5 million metric tonne per annum cement plant in Ethiopia. Two months later he commissioned another 1.5 million metric tonne per annum cement plant, with an accompanied 30 megawatts coal plant, in Ndola, Zambia. Three weeks after the Zambian project, he commissioned another 1.5 million metric tonne per annum plant in Douala, Cameroon. In this pan-African drive to turn cement into the new oil, Dangote signed a $4.34billion contract to construct 11 plants – 10 in Africa and one in Nepal.

If philanthropy is a ground-wetting exercise for business, then Dangote is a champion in irrigating arid business domain. Besides the ethical demands on corporate and business groups to ‘replenish their soil’ by giving back to society through corporate social responsibility, Dangote engages in news-breaking charities through the Dangote Foundation and the Dangote Academy for capacity-building and youth empowerment. The foundation collaborates with international organizations and charities to sponsor local healthcare projects. At the height of the Ebola crisis in West Africa, the foundation committed N609 million to fight the scourge. In the same manner, it doled out $1million to uplift Nepal after the devastating earthquake that hit the country.

In spite of his astute and exponential business drive, Aliko Dangote is known to be a simple, humble individual with perceptible equanimity. Coupled with this are his broadmindedness, detribalized nature and political neutrality. By investing both at home and abroad (in 18 African countries), what Dangote is doing to Nigeria’s economy is equal to what the founding fathers did to Nigeria’s nationalism. Being a one-man African economic superpower, Dangote, with his companies and franchises, is gradually shrinking the unemployment spread of teeming African youths, and is poised to do more. For instance, it is estimated that Ethiopia’s cement plant is capable of creating 2,000 direct employment and 5,000 indirect jobs. The replication of this in other plants would be an exemplary economic kick-starter. His present manufacturing concerns, despite all odds, are a considerable foreign exchange earner for Nigeria’s economy. But when his refinery comes into operation in 2018, and when the added value chain are considered, the prospect of huge foreign exchange generation and internal foreign exchange savings, are promisingly high.

In exuding such visionary posture and being so economically iconic, Dangote fosters an economic self-determination of all Africa. In this way, he demonstrates leadership of a different kind; a forward-looking leadership which present crop of African leaders lack – one that must cure Africa’s governance structure of the externalist malady that seeks solution to African economic problem in foreign action and intervention.

How was Dangote able to drive the wheels of industrial production in Nigeria and the continent? Perhaps, the answer lies in what Mezue et al call ‘Market-creating innovation’ which is committed to transforming continental liabilities into assets.

He was born in Kano, Northern Nigeria’s commercial nerve centre, on April 10, 1957, to influential business parents Mariya Sanusi Dantata and Mohammed Dangote. Aliko Dangote had his early education in the town of his birth. A graduate of Business Studies from Al-Azahar University, Cairo, Egypt, Dangote’s formal venture into business was in 1977 when he used the capital given to him by his grandfather, Alhaji Sanusi Dantata, to trade in local commodities and building materials. That same year, he moved to Lagos and experienced set back in cement business. However, the tremendous success experienced in commodities trading encouraged him to incorporate two companies in 1981. Before long, a chain of other registered companies coalesced into the Dangote Group.

In the narration of his humble beginning, he said: “I started small as a trader in cement. Then I left cement around 1978 because there was this armada and cement was difficult to get at that time. I had my own money which my grandfather gave me free, but then he gave me also an additional loan of N500, 000 (about $3,000) which was big money in those days. The money was quite a substantial amount then. The loan was supposed to be paid back whenever I was okay, maybe after three or four years. But I paid the loan back within six months.”
From a humble $3,000 in 1978, Dangote is said to have an estimated net worth of US$18.6 billion, thus making him the richest man in Africa. His chain of companies include Dangote Textiles and The Nigeria Textile Mills, the sugar refinery at Apapa port, and another sugar mill at Hadeja in Jigawa State; the National Salt Company of Nigeria at Ota, Ogun State, and factories in Apapa and Calabar; a vehicle leasing unit with over 100 fully air-conditioned commuter buses, and a real estate company managing luxury flats and high rise complexes in Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Abuja and Kano.

In recognition of his philanthropy and contributions to Nigeria’s and Africa’s economic growth, Dangote, a father of three, has been conferred with several awards at home and all the African countries in which he has business concerns.

Amongst these are the prestigious Zik Award for professional leadership (1992), Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) in 2000 and Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) in 2005, Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) in 2011. In 2014, Dangote was named as the Forbes Africa Person of the Year 2014. Dangote is a metaphor for the Nigerian business community and hope for the continent. This quality, and his giant accomplishments, recommends him as The Guardian Man of the Year 2015.

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