“Just let me tell you, yesterday, with the support from the President of Kenya, we bought 25 per cent of the pipeline network for the distribution of petroleum products,” he stated.
The Group, he defined, was additionally growing a distribution hall linking Djibouti with Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, together with tank farms designed to help the storage and motion of petroleum merchandise.
He added that one other challenge in Cameroon was nearing completion, whereas Namibia had been recognized as a serious strategic location for the Group’s growth into Southern Africa.
Dangote stated Namibia would play a very vital position due to its comparatively brief maritime distance from the Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Lagos, making it attainable to determine an environment friendly provide route into the southern a part of the continent.
“From our refinery to Namibia is just about four days of steaming,” he stated.
According to him, the plan is to move refined petroleum merchandise from Lagos to Namibia and subsequently distribute them by way of interconnected markets, together with Botswana and South Africa.
He additionally outlined one other proposed distribution hall extending by way of Zimbabwe and Zambia, explaining that the target was to develop an in depth network able to serving a number of nations by way of strategically situated storage and transportation infrastructure.
The growth comes alongside the Group’s plans to determine one other refinery in Lamu, Kenya, with a proposed capability of roughly 700,000 barrels per day.
Dangote stated the choice to speculate in East Africa was knowledgeable by the area’s substantial industrial and mining actions, rising vitality necessities and chronic difficulties in accessing diesel and different petroleum merchandise.
He defined that the proposed Kenyan refinery would supply crude oil from totally different markets quite than rely completely on manufacturing from Uganda or Kenya, thereby making a broader provide base for its operations.
According to him, the collection of Lamu adopted technical assessments of a number of potential areas, with entry to deep water, marine amenities and adequate water sources rising as important concerns.
The industrialist stated the investment resolution was reached inside 4 months, though he alleged that vested business pursuits had tried to frustrate the challenge by way of authorized proceedings shortly earlier than its public unveiling.
He maintained that the expertise mirrored the extraordinary competitors and highly effective pursuits working in the worldwide petroleum business.
Beyond vitality infrastructure, Dangote used the dialog to make a case for industrial safety, arguing that African economies should create an enabling surroundings for home producers if they’re to flee dependence on imported items.
He questioned why African nations ought to expose their rising industries to unrestricted international competitors when main economies had been more and more adopting measures to defend their very own manufacturing sectors.
Citing developments in the United States and the worldwide vehicle business, Dangote argued that defending strategic industries was not peculiar to growing economies however a broadly recognised instrument of commercial coverage.
“If America is now saying, no, we are going to protect our industries, who are we in Africa not to protect our own industries?” he requested.
Dangote additionally disclosed that the Group had budgeted roughly $50 billion for investments between 2026 and 2030, describing the programme as a part of a broader ambition to show Africa’s capability to execute large-scale industrial tasks.
He stated the investments had been supposed not solely to broaden the Group’s operations but in addition to encourage different African entrepreneurs and buyers to take part in the continent’s industrial transformation.
“The legacy we are trying to set up is how do we industrialise our continent?” he stated.
He argued that Africa’s improvement would rely upon constructing sturdy monetary establishments, adopting efficient agricultural and industrial insurance policies, and addressing persistent infrastructure deficits that continued to constrain financial progress.
Dangote recognized unreliable electrical energy provide as some of the vital obstacles to industrialisation, significantly in mining and mineral processing, the place the absence of reliable energy usually prevented nations from including worth to their pure sources earlier than export.
He stated roughly 650 million Africans lacked entry to electrical energy, stressing that fixing the continent’s energy challenges would create alternatives for manufacturing, employment and financial diversification.
Questioning why a continent endowed with huge agricultural land, mineral sources and a youthful inhabitants ought to proceed to expertise widespread poverty, Dangote insisted that Africa possessed the foundations required to turn out to be a serious industrial drive.
He expressed confidence that the continent’s financial transformation had already begun and that African governments and entrepreneurs had been changing into more and more aware of the necessity to take duty for his or her industrial future.
“The journey has started,” he declared. “But now we’re awake, and we will make it happen.”
