Flashback:Forbes Billionaires 2015: Which Billionaires Lost The Most Money.
For Dangote, the upheaval has meant lower demand for his cement (“There are places in the north where no one is thinking of building a home,” one Dangote executive says), and he cut cement prices twice last year, most recently by 14% in November. But whether it’s Jonathan or someone else ruling Nigeria, observers find it difficult to believe that anyone would shut him out of the presidential palace. He’s simply too important to the economy.
A position that’s ever growing. Oil now represents another big play for him, and he’s busy building a refinery some 40 minutes by car outside central Lagos. Dangote explains with uncharacteristic glee that the recent drop in prices will actually make construction easier. His suppliers will be desperate … and easy pickings. “We will be the only ones around,” he says. “We will carry a big knife and cut them on prices.”
The refinery, Dangote says, can be profitable even at $50 to $70 a barrel. Raw crude for the refinery will come from multiple suppliers. If all goes according to plan, it’ll produce 650,000 barrels a day–a variety of gas, diesel and jet fuel–and Dangote would basically walk away with a monopoly on refined oil in the country. The four Nigerian National Petroleum refineries are viewed as corrupt to the point of nonfunctioning.
To make it happen, Dangote plans to invest some $10 billion to $11 billion in the project and an adjacent petrochemical plant, with at least $6.75 billion in debt financing. Dangote threw a big celebration the day he signed the loan terms at the Hilton in Abuja. Guests included state governors, bank executives and, naturally, the president.
Dangote wants his companies to have a
combined market value of $100 billion; an oil refinery is the next part
in that grand plan, and he wants it to go public by 2020.
Terraforming is almost complete on the
refinery’s 10-square-mile site–a jungle swamp now turned into a sandy
expanse. A drive-through reveals a few stick huts, the last remnants of
native villages that were there before Dangote arrived. Dangote
executives promise the government has compensated the displaced natives
well. As a stream of black Dangote trucks pass–one with a full bed of
armed guards–a woman scurries inside a hut and shoots back a dark look.
The convoy pulls to a halt
on a palm-tree-lined beach, a tropical paradise more suited to
multimillion-dollar condos than refining petrochemicals. It’s a goner,
though, the future home of another Dangote empire. “The refinery will
start in 2018 if we finish on time,” Dangote says, optimistic as always.
“By that time all the dead bodies will have been removed from the
street. All the trouble will be gone.”
forbes.
