The legendary Nigerian businessman and Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, who was worth US$29.3 billion last week according to Bloomberg, continues to inspire generations of African entrepreneurs. The question that readily comes to mind is what makes him such a huge business success? What makes Aliko Dangote tick? How can we create ten more Aliko Dangotes in Nigeria and Africa in the next ten years? Is his enormous business success a happenstance, a chance event, ordained by God, or the result of vision and deliberate planning, and disciplined execution? Maybe a combination of some of the foregoing, but personal vision and mission-driven entrepreneurial spirit and grit played a huge role, as we will see from the following.
Aliko Mohammed Dangote was born on April 10, 1957, into a wealthy and industrious Kano family. His maternal grandfather was Alhaji Sanusi Dantata, who, as a major commodity trader and one of the richest Africans of his generation, took a keen interest in him and raised him at an early age and mentored him, and instilled the entrepreneurial spirit in him. After his return home with a degree in business administration from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, at the young age of 21, he immediately launched his own business, setting aside the attractive temptation of securing a comfort zone in the Dantata group of businesses. He relocated to Lagos, secured a loan of US$500,000 from his uncle, Alhaji Aminu Dantata, one of the wealthiest men in Nigeria, who only recently passed away on June 28, 2025, at the age of 94. With the loan, he imported sugar from Brazil and rice from Thailand and was able to repay the loan in a record time of three months.
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He incorporated Dangote Industries Limited (DIL) in April 1985. After twenty years as a merchant importing pasta, sugar, salt, and flour, Dangote started manufacturing these products in 1997. Dangote Industries Limited incorporated Dangote Cement as a subsidiary in 1981 and bought into Obajana Cement Plc in 2002, a company incorporated by the Kogi State government in 1992. By 2010, the company had become fully owned by DIL, and its name was changed to Dangote Cement Plc. Dangote Cement led the charge of making Nigeria self-sufficient in cement production, beginning when the challenge was thrown by the President Olusegun Obasanjo-led Federal Government in 2002. Nigeria became a net exporter of cement in 2021. DIL controls about 60 percent of the Nigerian cement market. Today, DIL manufactures cement in ten African countries, currently produces over 52 million metric tons of cement in Africa, and operates cement businesses in over ten African countries.
“We need business people who should be more audacious, more visionary with great foresight, breaking barriers and pushing back the frontiers of innovations and entrepreneurial achievements like Aliko Dangote.”
The largest single investment by Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), which is personified by Aliko Dangote, is the US$20 billion Dangote Refinery and petrochemicals, which, through its 650,000 barrels per day capacity petroleum refinery, can meet Nigeria’s premium motor spirit (PMS) needs, apart from the fertilizer and petrochemical plants. Aliko Dangote’s next transformational strategic intent as the foremost African entrepreneur is to make Africa self-sufficient in fertilizer production within forty months. He also had muted the desire to establish an integrated iron and steel plant in Nigeria, but had been discouraged by the perceived alarm of do-nothing critics who would accuse him of wanting to take over the entire economy.
For the avoidance of doubt, I hold no brief for Dangote Industries Limited. This article does not represent a public relations stunt for Mr. Aliko Dangote and his business interests, nor is the intention to idolise him. That he is a living African entrepreneurial legend and the richest man of African descent on the face of planet earth is in no doubt, which is worth celebrating. He is certainly not a saint, and there are quite a number of controversies and allegations surrounding some of his business practices, bordering on monopolistic tendencies and the use of political influence to outmaneuver competitors. I choose to stay focused on the positive, indeed the immense, contributions of Mr. Dangote to the development of the Nigerian economy, especially in cement production and petroleum refining.
The challenge for contemporary Nigerian and African entrepreneurs is how to replicate and imbibe Dangote’s spirit of enterprise and his patriotic zeal to use his audacious entrepreneurial fervour and resourcefulness to rescue Nigeria from economic doldrums in different sectors of the economy. Nigeria and indeed Africa need more people like Aliko Dangote. To be certain, there is an impressive list of other Nigerian entrepreneurs making their marks in various sectors of the Nigerian economy. These include Abdu Samad Rabiu, of the BUA conglomerate, Mike Adenuga, promoter of Globacom and Conoil, Femi Otedola, Jim Ovia, Tony Elumelu, Theophilus Danjuma, Arthur Eze, and Folorunsho Alakija, among others, in no particular order. One can also list twenty-one African US dollar-denominated billionaires, beginning with Aliko Dangote of Nigeria, to Aziz Akhannouch of Morocco. The trouble is they are from only seven African countries, and for a continent as large as Africa, the number is very few.
The point of view of this article is not just the celebration of the few Nigerian and African billionaires. There are certainly many more rich and successful African and Nigerian entrepreneurs who are very successful in their various areas of business endeavours, who are not necessarily dollar-denominated billionaires and whose contributions to our economic development need to be sufficiently acknowledged and celebrated as wealth creators, employers of labour, innovators, and builders of their national economies.
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Nigerian entrepreneurs particularly need to pick up the gauntlet of Dangote’s entrepreneurial challenge in an atmosphere of healthy competition. We need business people who should be more audacious, more visionary, with great foresight, breaking barriers and pushing back the frontiers of innovations and entrepreneurial achievements like Aliko Dangote. Nigeria needs to urgently move from a largely import-dependent consumer nation to an export-oriented producing nation. Nigeria currently ranks fourth in Africa with a 0.6046 AII (Africa Industrialisation Index) after South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt. (The ranking did not take into account the recently commissioned Dangote Refinery and Petrochemicals.) Given our resource endowment, including human and material resources, geographical location, and our position as the most industrialised economy in West and Central Africa, we need to position ourselves as the factory of West and Central Africa in the next five years and a Newly Industrialised Country (NIC) within the next ten years.
This is not a vision Aliko Dangote can single-handedly help to realise. Add to that the aspiration to become a trillion-dollar economy by 2030, and it becomes imperative that our entrepreneurs pick up the patriotic challenge to break new grounds and push back frontiers and conquer new territories, drawing inspiration from the uncommon exploits of our patriotic and audacious compatriot, Aliko Dangote. May his tribe increase.
Mr. Igbinoba is the Team Lead/CEOs at ProServe Options Consulting, Lagos
