In the beginning, there was no refinery. The whole of today’s Dangote Refinery land was a massive peninsula, seven times bigger than Victoria Island, surrounded by the mighty Atlantic Ocean where the sea goddess Olokun, described as the orisha of great wealth, rules from the bottom of the ocean. According to Wikipedia, “Olokun is highly praised for (the) ability to give great wealth, health, and prosperity to her followers.|”
Before the refinery, the vast area was filled with shrines manned by chief priests and priestesses with devotees coming to worship the sea goddess and other deities. It was a fetish, magical land straight out of the novels of Amos Tutuola and D.O. Fagunwa who pioneered the Yoruba language novel.
When Aliko Dangote, the cement king of Africa paid $100 million to the Lagos State government for the massive land, he did not foresee nor did he anticipate a spiritual and physical battles with idol-worshipping inhabitants. Dangote told a group of journalists he had invited for a tour of his refinery a fortnight ago:
“The problem we had was with the community. They had a lot of shrines which they didn’t want us to remove or violate. It took the intervention of the Ooni of Ife (Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi), who came to help us remove the shrines. We didn’t want them to come and disturb us. The Ooni was very helpful. We are indeed very grateful to him for helping us out of that situation.”
Flashing back, the journey to the Dangote Refinery started on Sunday, July 14, 2024. Oh, what a Sunday! I had woken at dawn, at the first cockcrow. I sacrificed church, sacrificed Wimbledon Tennis finals, sacrificed European Cup finals, sacrificed everything to be among the crème de la crème journalists from all over the nation, loaded in six air-conditioned white buses, heading for the refinery from the Dangote head office, Union Marble House, in Falomo, Lagos. It took an hour’s drive to arrive at the refinery described by some journalists as the “Eight wonder of the world.”
A wonderland we saw indeed. One that defies description. One that cannot be aptly captured in words. You really needed to be there to see the magic unravel in your eyes, in this symphony of iron giants, metals, python-sized pipes wrapping around metals, gargantuan reservoirs and assorted engineering contraptions that will surely impress Gustav Eiffel, the engineer who built the famous Eiffel Tower—the pride of Paris. Towering above us like skyscrapers as we approached from a distance were the distillation towers or the distillation columns, an important equipment in the refining of crude oil. How can I forget the gas flaring and lighting up the sky like an Olympic flame? How can I forget the whooshing sound of escaping steam punctuating the air like the sound of steam train? How can I forget the young, brilliant scientists in their white robes, speaking English with a northern accent, taking us round and explaining to us how the refinery works?
My most unforgettable memory is driving into a metallic pier, a raised platform that opens into the majestic, awesome blueness of the Atlantic Ocean down below us. Here was where we first alighted from our buses, to observe the beauty of the mighty ocean far, far down below, rolling beneath our feet. It was at the pier that I met Alhaji Aliko Dangote whom I had not seen face to face for nearly a decade. He noticed my beards and remarked: “Mike, you now wear beards?”
Dangote himself has aged too, with his hair now grown grey, a testament to the hard work of a man who audaciously built a refinery, against all odds. A refinery that produces 650,000 barrels per day which is the largest single refinery train in the world. It was a happy reunion after he stopped me from completing a book on him I was writing titled DANGOTE: NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE, perhaps because he didn’t want anything to distract him from finishing his refinery. I moved on to write my own magnum opus, a book titled: 50 NIGERIA’S BOARDROOM LEADERS—Lessons On Corporate Governance and Strategies. A massive book I see as my own refinery!
We embraced and took a selfie. Many other journalists took turns taking photographs with him, using their smartphones to capture the moment.
All day long, we visited one facility after another, including the 3 million metric tonnes per annum (mmtpa) Urea and Ammonia fertilizer plant. We are told that Dangote’s investment in petroleum refining, petrochemical and fertilizer is in excess of $22.5 billion. In the evening, we were so tired but we still had time for a Question and Answer session. I asked what entrepreneurial lessons he had learnt from building such a world-class refinery. And he answered: “Awoyinfa, it’s a life experience. If I start telling you about my experience, what I learnt from this project, we would be here for a whole day. When we started, we didn’t know the magnitude, of what we were getting into. As I told CNN in an interview, I said if I knew what we were getting into, I wouldn’t have even started it at all. Honestly, we didn’t have a single idea of what we were getting into.”
He likened the experience to “finding ourselves in the middle of the sea. If we stop swimming, we sink. The only option is just to continue swimming, no matter how high the tide. And that is what we did. But we thank God we survived to tell our story.”
He continues: “Initially, I didn’t like idea of writing a book, but for the first time, I have decided I must write my memoirs. It would be about project execution, especially in Africa. Because in Africa, the situation is far different from that overseas. Here, there is no infrastructure. We now have to go and build roads. And building the roads is not a joke. Building roads is another headache. It’s an industry on its own.”
Looking back, Dangote says, “what gives me a lot of joy—not only me, myself and the team—is the self-sufficiency we are creating, and also job creation. And also creating what we call a circular economy. So the entire process, which is the banking, the distributors, our staff, we are all going to end up using our domestic banks, rather than foreign banks such as Bank of America. Bank of America shouldn’t benefit from what we have built. It should be the likes of Access Bank, UBA, First Bank, Zenith Bank and Co. So that we can all go together. Because today, if they go and raise 500 billion, what are they going to do with the money?
“If the intention was for us to just make money, if we had bought shares in Google, invest in Elon Musk’s company, invest in Microsoft and Co, maybe the money we spent here would be over a hundred billion in real cash. What gives us joy is actually to put up something like this and leave a legacy such that one day, in future, someone would say, there was one Dangote, he came and this was what he did. That is what is driving us.”