Africa's richest man Aliko Dangote offers to build East Africa a refinery as big as Lagos

Aliko Dangote told East African heads of state on Thursday that he is willing to build a crude oil refinery in Tanzania as large as his 650,000-barrel-per-day plant in Lagos, and Kenya's President William Ruto said his government and Uganda are already in talks with Africa's richest man to make it happen.

The announcement came at the inaugural Africa We Build Summit hosted by the Africa Finance Corporation at the JW Marriott Hotel in Nairobi, an event that brought together heads of state, investors and development finance institutions under the theme of infrastructure as a driver of industrialisation. It was Dangote who put the offer plainly on the table.

"If the president of Kenya or Uganda supports us, we'll build an oil refinery in this region just as big as the one in Lagos," he said.

Ruto, speaking at the same event, confirmed the conversations were already underway. He said Kenya and Uganda are in talks with Dangote to build the refinery in Tanzania, and that the plan includes a pipeline running from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa to Tanga in northeastern Tanzania. The refinery would process crude from countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

Why the timing matters

The proposal lands at a moment of acute fuel supply anxiety across East Africa. The US-Iran war has disrupted shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, cut access to Gulf fuel supplies, and driven freight costs up sharply. East African countries that relied on refined product imports from the Middle East and Europe are scrambling for alternatives, and the gap between what the region produces and what it consumes has become impossible to ignore.

Dangote's refinery in Lagos has already begun supplying refined petroleum to Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and other African nations. In March 2026 alone, the refinery exported 12 cargoes of refined petroleum products totalling 456,000 tonnes to 5 African countries: Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Tanzania, Ghana and Togo. Kenya and South Africa are separately in discussions with the refinery for longer-term procurement arrangements.

That track record is exactly the kind of proof of concept that makes the East Africa proposal credible. Dangote is not pitching a vision. He is pitching a replication of something that already works.

The infrastructure logic

Tanga is not a random choice. It is where the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, the 1,443-kilometre system being built to carry Ugandan crude from the Lake Albert oilfields to the Indian Ocean, terminates. All pipes for the EACOP have been delivered to construction sites in Uganda and Tanzania, and first oil is expected in the second half of 2026. A refinery at Tanga would sit at the receiving end of that pipeline, converting Ugandan crude into refined products for regional distribution rather than shipping it raw to Asia or Europe.

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, also at the summit, gave the clearest statement yet of how his government frames the value-addition question. He said Uganda is already building a small refinery for the local market with a capacity of 50,000 to 60,000 barrels per day, covering parts of Tanzania and Kenya. But he drew a harder line on the broader principle. Unprocessed gold, he noted, sells for $60,000 per kilogram. Processed gold commands $168,000. He described stopping an Indian investor who was buying Uganda's iron ore at $45 a tonne and reselling it at $900 a tonne. The math of exporting raw materials, he said, amounts to exporting jobs.

A Dangote-scale refinery at Tanga would change that calculation for crude oil. Instead of Uganda's Lake Albert production flowing through EACOP to be refined overseas, it would be processed regionally, capturing the margin domestically and distributing finished fuel across a landlocked hinterland that currently has no direct access to the coast.

Uganda's fuel supply picture adds further urgency. The country gets approximately 90% of its refined petroleum imports through Kenya's pipeline system, an arrangement that has been strained recently by policy disputes over import licensing between the two countries. Uganda and Tanzania agreed in February 2026 to fast-track a two-way pipeline connecting Uganda to Tanga, initially to allow Uganda to import fuel through Tanzania during the construction period for its domestic refinery, and later to export processed fuels outward once that refinery is running.

The Dangote proposal would potentially replace or dramatically scale that interim arrangement.

Dangote's own expansion ambitions

The East Africa pitch is consistent with a broader push Dangote has been making since his Lagos refinery reached full capacity in February 2026. He has described his company's goal as becoming a $100 billion revenue enterprise by 2030 through a $40 billion investment programme that includes doubling Lagos refinery capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day, expanding into polypropylene and petrochemicals, and building fertilizer operations across the continent.

The financing infrastructure for that ambition is being assembled in parallel. In March 2026, Afreximbank anchored $2.5 billion of a $4 billion syndicated loan for the refinery, co-arranged with Access Bank, in what Afreximbank described as the largest syndicated facility it has ever led. A pan-African IPO of 5% to 10% of the refinery, targeting a June to July 2026 debut on the Nigerian Exchange, is expected to raise up to $5 billion from investors across multiple African stock exchanges at a company valuation between $40 billion and $50 billion.

Building a second major refinery in East Africa, if the talks with Kenya and Uganda progress, would be a separate and enormous undertaking on top of all of that. No financing structure, timeline or site has been publicly detailed. What Thursday's summit produced was a public alignment of political will between Dangote, Ruto and Museveni around a shared ambition, and a clear statement that the conversation is happening.

Ruto addressed what he called one of the biggest obstacles to regional industrial cooperation. "Petty jealousy is a problem in Africa," he said, describing how a request for Uganda to supply iron ore for processing in Nairobi was initially declined before Kenyan investors established processing operations in Uganda instead. He framed the outcome as proof that integration works when countries get out of their own way.

Whether the Tanzania refinery goes from summit pledge to steel in the ground will depend on how quickly that lesson translates into binding agreements.