The audacity of African hope

In July 2023, I wrote in this column about my return from Lagos where a group of Kenyan and Nigerian executives had been taken on a study tour of the Lagos Free Zone (LFZ) that lies 60 kilometres east of Lagos.

“The Nigerian government undertook a public private partnership with a Singaporean conglomerate Tolaram to provide a $2.5 billion investment in the LFZ which included the project development, capital raise and construction of Lekki Port, Nigeria’s first deep sea port adjacent to the LFZ, which is jointly owned with the Nigerian Port Authority and the Lagos State Government…. As you approach the 2,100 acres of the LFZ, the first thing you see are multiple building cranes around acres of oil storage tanks.”

“Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Company (located next to the LFZ) … stands tall as a towering exemplar of native African entrepreneurship. While Nigeria has four State owned refineries, their decrepit state due to years of mismanagement means that the oil producing nation has to export most of their crude oil while importing about 80 percent of refined petroleum products. Dangote’s $19 billion private investment of equity and debt targeted to producing refined petroleum products, petrochemicals and fertilisers has generated great excitement at a macroeconomic level.”

Last week, I joined another group of African executives’ tour of the completed petroleum refinery and fertiliser plant.

This time, the tall cranes that I had spotted in the distance exactly two years ago were now replaced with a singular flare stack, a chimney as it were, through which tall flames boldly flickered.

The flames, though a safety mechanism for burning off excess flammable gases produced in a refinery, were a burning flag and testimony to Alhaji Aliko Dangote’s grit.

Read:  Dangote arranges $4.5bn financing for world's largest refinery

And his sheer audacity. In an intimate gathering around a table following the tour, the soft spoken, richest indigenous African man walked us through the challenges of building what is evidently one of the biggest megastructures on the continent.

Seventy percent of the 2,735 hectares of land on which the facilities are built was a swamp. They had to dredge 65 million cubic metres of sand to back fill the land using the world’s largest, second largest and tenth largest dredgers.

Let me put that into financial perspective, it took 300 million euros or Sh45 billion just to make the land usable, elevating the height by 1.5 metres to insure against the potential impact of a rise in sea level due to global warming.

As much of the equipment for the refinery was too large to be transported on Lagos roads and bridges after landing at the main Lagos port, the builders had to construct their own jetties and build their own small harbor to receive the ships carrying the equipment.

This ended up working out well because the same jetties are now used to upload the temperature sensitive Dangote fertiliser onto ships for export.

There is not enough space here to capture what we saw driving through the 112 kilometres of concrete roads that Dangote has built on the sprawling industrial complex.

But we did see something with our own eyes: how billions of dollars can be used to transform a swamp, an identified trade zone, an economy, a country and, in the fullness of time, a continent.

The highly digitally controlled refinery is largely overseen by young, smart Nigerian men and women with a few expatriates who provide the capacity building required to fulfil his vision of an Africa built and driven by Africans.

Dressed in very simple Hausa traditional garb, with no visible expensive watch, jewellery or designer red-soled shoes, Dangote spoke at length about his vision for the continent, challenging us that “If you think small, you won’t grow, but if you think big you grow!”

Audacity. Dangote lives that every day and twice on Sunday. As he humorously reflected, if he had known how hard it would be to build this massive project he would never have started it in the first place. But he has chosen to lean into that entrepreneurial ignorance to do even more.

“We can build the largest deep sea port in Nigeria and the largest urea fertiliser plant. Now that we have built this, we don’t fear anything.” Money shouts in very cosmetic ways, but wealth whispers and transforms. Real billionaires make real transformations. I walked away from that encounter with many lessons, the key one being: Do it scared, do it ignorantly, but just do it anyway!

The writer is a corporate governance specialist and a former banker. X: @carolmusyoka