Aliko Dangote has said the planned listing of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals on the Nigerian Exchange was designed to democratize wealth creation and give Africans direct access to participation in the continent’s industrial transformation, telling South African institutional investors who toured the facility that the project demonstrated what African-led capital and vision could achieve at global scale.
The South African delegation, which included the leadership of the Government Employees Pension Fund, Africa’s largest defined benefit pension fund managing the retirement benefits of more than 1.8 million public sector workers, the Public Investment Corporation, and Alterra Capital Partners, toured both the refinery and Dangote Fertilizer Limited in Lagos.
Dangote said Africa’s next phase of economic growth had to be anchored on large-scale industrial projects capable of creating jobs, strengthening domestic production, and generating broad-based prosperity, noting that current demand for products including polypropylene, aviation fuel, and refined petroleum products had already exceeded earlier projections, leaving the refinery practically living hand to mouth even at full capacity.
GEPF Chairperson Frans Baleni said the refinery was reshaping how the world should think about African industrial capability and how Africa should think about itself, describing it as the kind of African-led industrial scale that institutional investors on the continent should be backing. PIC CEO Patrick Dlamini, whose institution managed approximately $230 billion in assets, said PIC’s mandate was to deploy long-term patient capital in service of industrialization and economic transformation across Africa and that there was real strategic alignment between Dangote’s industrial agenda and PIC’s portfolio positioning.
