Aliko Dangote, Lagos, Nigeria, 26 August 2015
Tom Saater · Bloomberg · Getty
As evening fell in Obajana, Kogi State, in central Nigeria, the cement works lit up. Throughout the highway from its barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, the township of corrugated iron-roofed buildings descended into darkness: two worlds separated by a highway filled with articulated lorries. Godwin Agada, a mechanic who has lived right here for 20 years, instructed me that ‘regardless of the large revenue he makes from right here, our neighbour’s carried out virtually nothing for us. The water’s now not drinkable and bronchial asthma circumstances have elevated. Two wells have been dug, however we eat mud. So we’re nonetheless ready for the progress that the Dangote Group promised.’
Resentment of Western and Chinese language multinationals is widespread in Africa, however individuals’s hostility in Kogi is directed at a pillar of the nationwide and pan-African economic system: Dangote Cement plc, based in 1977 and one of many nation’s two largest market capitalisations, with an annual turnover of $2bn.
It’s the core enterprise of the conglomerate headed by Nigerian entrepreneur and philanthropist Aliko Dangote, 66, Africa’s richest particular person and the world’s 136th wealthiest, value $19.6bn in January 2023 in accordance with the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Dangote, often known as the ‘Prince of Kano’, after Nigeria’s second metropolis the place he was born, runs a gaggle of corporations whose actions vary from meals processing (flour, salt, pasta, drinks, packaging) to actual property and port logistics. He’s about to maneuver into oil refining and urea (used as a fertiliser and feed complement), nevertheless it’s to cement that he nonetheless owes greater than 85% of his private wealth.
The Obajana Cement Plant, one among three Dangote owns in Nigeria, is the continent’s largest. He acquired it and its limestone quarries from Kogi State in 2003. Upgraded and reopened in 2008, the previous state-owned firm now has 5 manufacturing traces. The modernisation and enlargement of the plant, which is served by a fleet of round 1,000 vehicles, was part-funded with loans value $220m from the World Financial institution and the European Funding Financial institution. Its forest of pipes, chimneys, clinker kilns and warehouses covers 4.5 hectares and produces as much as 13.25 million tonnes of cement yearly, a couple of fifth of the full output of the entire Dangote group, which operates in ten African international locations, from Senegal to South Africa.
The African cement market has been rising at a median of 5% per yr because the starting of the century to fulfill demand for brand spanking new cities, air-conditioned condominiums for the higher center class and stable properties for the inhabitants of the brand new city fringes of the main metropolises, in addition to ports, bridges and dams. In Nigeria, demand for cement jumped by greater than 40% between September 2020 and April 2021 (1). From 2000 to 2009, it elevated by 400%. And regardless of the financial disaster following the Covid-19 pandemic and the impression of the warfare in Ukraine, the outlook stays shiny. Demand remains to be nicely under another areas, notably Asia: Nigeria makes use of 121kg of cement per capita yearly, in comparison with a world common of 513kg.
Costs double world market charges
Mass results and vertical integration (in addition to cement costs which are virtually double these on the world market) have enabled Dangote to extend his fortune in addition to his standing as a pan-African icon, to the purpose the place he was one of many co-chairs of the forty fourth World Financial Discussion board in Davos in 2014.
‘Dangote is the stuff of desires in Africa,’ says geographer and concrete planner Armelle Choplin of the College of Geneva. ‘His wealth, his household and his success command respect and admiration – and arouse envy and jealousy on the similar time. Younger Africans now dream of changing into footballers or cement producers. He embodies success, changing the determine of the mental with a university diploma who predominated within the Eighties’ (2).
An indication of this success are the builders’ yards promoting 50-kg luggage of Dangote 3X cement that line the lengthy city hall between Lagos and Accra in Ghana. The ‘Dangote manner’ with its ‘seven pillars of sustainable improvement’, which function within the multinational’s annual studies, wins awards within the enterprise world: Dangote Cement lately acquired the ‘general most accountable enterprise’ award on the sixteenth Africa Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Accountability Awards (3). Dangote likes to emphasize that his firm works laborious to ‘assist sustainable improvement and the United Nations Sustainable Growth Objectives (SDGs)’ (4). However in Kogi State, such discuss is tough to sq. with the fact on the bottom.
Regardless of the large revenue Dangote makes from right here, our neighbour’s carried out virtually nothing for us. The water’s now not drinkable and bronchial asthma circumstances have elevated. Two wells have been dug, however we eat mud
Godwin Agada
Early on the morning of 5 October 2022 a number of hundred individuals, together with government-employed Kogi State Vigilante Service militiamen, native authorities officers and Obajana residents, Godwin Agada amongst them, converged on the doorway to the cement plant in response to a name from state governor Yahaya Bello. The gang demanded the plant’s closure following a court docket ruling that discovered irregularities in the way it had been acquired. After a standoff with website safety, the demonstrators blocked the trail of concrete mixers. The blockade lasted 48 hours, till the central authorities despatched in particular forces from Lokoja, the state capital.
Political and authorized battle
Their strong-arm intervention reopened the plant, however the political and authorized battle isn’t over, as Prince Mustapha Audu, inheritor to an aristocratic Igala lineage, instructed me. Audu – a businessman and activist with the All Progressives Congress (APC), the brand new head of state Bola Tinubu’s celebration – is the son of the primary democratically elected governor of Kogi State, Abubakar Audu, who arrange the state-owned Obajana cement manufacturing facility in 1992. The challenge was interrupted underneath Sani Abacha’s dictatorship (1993-98) by the appointment of army governors, however was revived in 1999 when Governor Audu was democratically returned to energy.
‘At the moment,’ Audu defined, ‘my father had already raised 12 million Deutschmarks [around $7m] from the German international improvement funds to hold out exploration and feasibility examine missions that had confirmed the existence of big limestone deposits. He subsequently began in search of Nigerian companions to co-develop what he thought of to be one among his most dear and profitable initiatives.’ He selected Dangote.
An settlement, signed in July 2002 and confirmed in February 2003, allotted 90% of the shares to Dangote, reserving 10% for Kogi State. ‘There was by no means any query of giving 100% of the shares to Dangote Cement,’ the prince mentioned. ‘But that is what mysteriously occurred underneath my father’s successor, Ibrahim Idris, who was elected in April 2003 as a consultant of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s celebration, the Folks’s Democratic Get together.’
The authorized battle between Kogi State and Dangote Cement is now being fought within the federal court docket of enchantment, however there’s little doubt as to the result: ‘Dangote will win and Governor Bello will fall into line,’ Audu predicts. The dispute will depart its mark, although, as a result of, ‘with out Kogi, Dangote wouldn’t have grow to be the richest man in Africa’.
Audu acknowledges he has the social standing and political clout to problem the Dangote Group. Three years in the past, he criticised the air pollution it brought on by burning coal to make cement. The manufacturing facility, which accounts for a 3rd of Dangote Cement’s whole power consumption, depends partly on coal which since 2016 has been mined close to Ankpa, 180km to the east. In 2020 the Mona-Audu Basis, headed by Audu’s spouse, Princess Zarah, who can be an APC member, took authorized motion towards the Dangote Group on behalf of individuals in Okada and Odagbo, who are suffering from respiratory and eye issues which have been linked to coal mining.
‘The value of silence’
‘At first we have been threatened,’ Audu instructed me. ‘There have been insinuations that I risked ruining my enterprise profession and ideas that it was incorrect to air soiled linen in public.’ It took direct intervention from Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, former emir of Kano and ex-governor of the Nigerian central financial institution, for Dangote Cement to agree a $270,000 compensation bundle for native individuals. ‘The value of silence’, Audu mentioned ruefully. ‘This group had by no means seen a lot cash…’
Mount Patti (458m) overlooks Lokoja, one of many 5 fastest-growing cities on the planet. The point of view, which takes within the confluence of the Benue and Niger rivers, is traditionally evocative: it’s right here that the English journalist Flora Shaw is claimed to have coined the identify Nigeria for the brand new British colonial territory fashioned by amalgamating two protectorates within the north and south of the nation which might be ruled by her future husband, Lord Frederick Lugard. Lokoja was the capital of the brand new colony till 1919.
A century on, oblique British-style administration now comes from Dangote, whose shadow looms over all establishments of energy. He has established himself as a ‘very horrible demonstration of what has been known as “patrimonial monopoly capitalism” in Nigeria’: this mannequin ‘participates within the continuum of corrupt practices as a result of it simply quantities to a manipulation of the state’s monetary wealth in ways in which favour just a few non-public people. In moral phrases, [it] confers an unfair benefit on rich enterprise issues over others with out such questionable entry to authorities funding and safety’ (5).
Dangote is descended from an extended line of Hausa retailers from northern Nigeria, together with Alhassan Dantata (1877-1955), a groundnut dealer who turned the richest African within the colonial period. Dangote’s rise started underneath the regime of Normal Shehu Shagari (1979-83) with the granting of import licences for bulk cement and accelerated throughout Sani Abacha’s dictatorship. Within the late Nineteen Nineties Dangote, having found the dimensions of Brazil’s manufacturing industries throughout a enterprise journey (6), started a strategic shift from imports to native manufacturing.
The political scenario was beneficial, because the return of democracy coincided with the privatisation of state-owned corporations towards a backdrop of more and more neoliberal insurance policies. President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007), whose re-election Dangote had backed financially in 2003, tailor-made laws to swimsuit the billionaire. At the moment, Dangote benefited massively from tax exemptions granted to Nigerian corporations thought of ‘pioneering’, and didn’t hesitate, in accordance with Saheedat Adetayo, ‘to assert this standing a number of instances for a similar cement plant every time he expanded it’.
No matter their political affiliation, Obasanjo’s successors have all acquired the identical monetary assist throughout their election campaigns. Dangote was additionally President Goodluck Jonathan’s particular financial advisor (2010-15). As one among Africa’s largest non-public employers – 19,561 individuals work for Dangote Cement – Dangote takes care to stay on the very best phrases with leaders and establishments. This is the reason he attended the brand new Kenyan president William Ruto’s inauguration in August 2022.
The African Union and the Financial Neighborhood of West African States, in the meantime, assist the AfroChampions Initiative, which he arrange with South Africa’s former president Thabo Mbeki, and which goals to ‘set off, by 2030, at the very least a trillion US {dollars} of investments to speed up implementation of the African Continental Free Commerce Space, notably to spice up infrastructure, cross-border connectivity and industrialisation whereas delivering a extra affluent Africa’ (7).
Dangote Cement’s rivals, primarily Western teams equivalent to Vicat, Holcim (previously LafargeHolcim) and Heidelberg, criticise Dangote’s closeness to Nigeria’s strongmen and his privileged entry to the continent’s presidential palaces. In 2014 the French firm Vicat accused him of getting benefited from preferential remedy in Senegal. On the similar time, in Cameroon, a Lafarge subsidiary suspected Dangote of fraudulently driving down nationwide market costs by smuggling in Nigerian-produced cement. In Nigeria, the rivalry between Dangote and his billionaire peer, Abdul Samad Rabiu, head of the BUA conglomerate, commonly makes the information.
‘The cement enterprise is a closed and secretive world,’ Choplin factors out, and Dangote Cement’s rivals usually are not finest positioned to provide ethical classes. In March 2021 in Zambia, the Swiss-French firm LafargeHolcim was accused by the Competitors and Client Safety Fee of getting arrange a southern cement cartel with Dangote’s Zambian subsidiary to interact in anti-competitive enterprise practices (8). In agreeing with different corporations to repair costs and carve up the market in central and southern Africa, the place demand for cement can be rising, Dangote Cement had assigned itself as provider to northern Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Nice Lakes area. Not like its rivals, which have been closely fined, the United Nations Convention on Commerce and Growth (UNCTAD) reported that Dangote had been granted leniency for offering data to the fee (9).
The identical self-interested indulgence could be present in Western enterprise and diplomatic circles looking for to strengthen their market presence in Africa’s second-largest economic system. At Versailles in January 2019, Dangote was a visitor of honour on the Select France summit, which introduced collectively greater than 150 leaders of French and international corporations and multinationals. Two years later, in September 2021, he went to the Élysée Palace for the gala dinner that closed France’s Africa 2020 cultural season .
Dangote is a member of the France-Nigeria Enterprise Council, which brings collectively some 15 French enterprise leaders (together with these of TotalEnergies, CMA-CGM, Dassault Aviation) and ‘six of an important Nigerian captains of trade, who even have the most important fortunes in Africa’ (10). Chaired by Rabiu, it additionally consists of the previous banker Tony Elumelu, originator of the idea of Africapitalism, which views the non-public sector as the principle engine of Africa’s financial transformation.
To achieve the Dangote group’s coal mines in Ankpa, you are taking a highway punctuated with checkpoints and the stays of automobiles bearing the corporate’s emblem; accidents brought on by its vehicles are legion in Kogi State. In 2020 as much as 100 vehicles handed by means of Onupi day by day, however no diggers stay on the website and all however 5 of its 300 staff are gone. They embrace an engineer, who was stunned by my go to however defined that extraction has merely been suspended by the corporate on profitability grounds. Mohammed Zubeidu Omale, alias Orator, 28, a well-recognized determine at marriage ceremony events and social occasions in Ankpa, instructed a special story: ‘It closed due to tensions with younger individuals.’
Dangote’s Nigerian empire
To use the coal, Dangote made group improvement agreements with villages near his mines. However though conventional chiefs could have been gained over, usually with luggage of cement, the younger individuals, regardless of just a few grants, felt overlooked of the method. The Onupi mine is a scar that cuts by means of luxuriant vegetation over a number of hectares: there are craters full of polluted water and hills with their tops sliced off. And it has bequeathed an invisible legacy of acid rain and contaminated water tables for Ankpa’s youthful technology.
Ibrahim Zepha was transporting 50 tonnes of coal from a mine operated by Dangote Cement to Obajana when his truck slid off the facet of the A233. Since then, Zepha, who has labored for Dangote for a yr, had spent 12 days ready in 37-degree warmth guarding his cargo and stranded automobile. The coal glistened within the blazing solar. Two tyres had vanished throughout the evening. The closest federal military roadblock, protected by a sentry field product of sand-filled Dangote sacks, is just one kilometre from the place he was ready. Taking a drag on the cigarette, Zepha puzzled if his employer had deserted him. ‘After which what is going to I do? I’ll by no means have the ability to pay for the tyres.’
Transporting coal, limestone, gypsum and cement for the Dangote group is especially carried out by drivers like Zepha, who’s Hausa and never unionised. ‘The group has by no means allowed us into its cement crops,’ mentioned Ayuba Wabba, secretary basic of the Nigerian Labour Congress in Abuja. He instructed me Dangote Cement is fast to threaten ‘comrades who’re considering of organising’. The identical obstacles to unionising exist on the website of the long run Ibeju-Lekki refinery, 73km from the Lagos marina, the place the billionaire’s yacht Mariya is moored. Nigeria has ratified the Worldwide Labour Organisation’s conference 98 on the best to organise and collective bargaining. ‘However are you able to think about a labour inspector going right into a Dangote plant?’ Wabba requested.
One other worrying situation, he mentioned, is the recruitment of Indian managers who’re ‘notably anti-union’. Although official figures from the corporate counsel they signify solely 4% of administration, they might be answerable for as a lot as 98% of choices. Throughout the pandemic, whereas the nation’s economic system was in lockdown, ending work on the Ibeju-Lekki refinery continued, due to a number of hundred unmasked Indian subcontractors. Dangote Cement, which till February was managed by a former Lafarge worker, the Frenchman Michel Puchercos, now has an Indian CEO, Arvind Pathak.
The worldwide press lengthen the identical indulgence to Dangote as Western governments. In March 2020 the weekend version of Les Échos prompt the ‘African Invoice Gates’ has as fashions ‘the good American industrialists and philanthropists equivalent to John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Like them, he doesn’t prefer to share’ (11). Now, Dangote appears to be following within the footsteps of his Indian friends, equivalent to Mukesh Ambani, the boss of the Reliance Industries conglomerate and the world’s ninth richest man, whose strategies are ruthless. Profiles could point out that Dangote’s identify appeared within the Panama Papers, however they usually flip into hagiography; a function in Le Figaro Journal praised ‘the billionaires who’re constructing Africa’ (12).
All this protection obscures the truth that Dangote Cement’s operations are the polar reverse of its dedication to decarbonisation: the manufacturing of cement, essentially the most broadly manufactured and consumed materials on the planet (forward of metal and plastic), contributes 4-8% of worldwide anthropogenic greenhouse gasoline emissions. The Obajana Cement Plant alone has a carbon footprint of 6.1 million tonnes of CO2 per yr, the equal of the Qatar World Cup.
This media tolerance, says Jahman Anikulapo Oladejo, former editor of the Sunday version of the Nigerian Guardian, ‘might also be as a result of giant promoting budgets that the Dangote group invests within the main 24-hour information channels’, from Al Jazeera to CNN Worldwide. CNN’s prestigious programme Facetime, which focuses on the African enterprise world, is Dangote-sponsored. The connection between the previous British colonial energy and the businessman can be hardly ever questioned by the worldwide media, although two distinguished Britons are on the board of his multinational as impartial non-executive administrators: lawyer Cherie Blair, spouse of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, and Mark Davis, former Conservative Get together treasurer and former head of the Anglo-Swiss mining firm Xstrata.
Throughout the 2023 presidential marketing campaign, Dangote, who has historic hyperlinks to the APC, financed the marketing campaign of its candidate, Bola Tinubu, who will likely be sworn in as the brand new head of state on the finish of Might – and likewise these of his unsuccessful challengers. However this time, Dangote should be extra beneficiant with these additional down the ladder, suggests Prince Mustapha Audu: ‘We’re all happy with his success, however now the problem is attending to a scenario the place Dangote, Kogi State and its individuals are all winners.’
