Billionaire Mohammed Dewji's MeTL signs Italian deal for silos at a Tanzanian grain plant

A company owned by Tanzanian billionaire Mohammed Dewji has signed a contract worth more than 2 million euros ($2.3 million) for Italian-built silos and industrial equipment to expand a grain storage facility in Tanzania, in a deal underwritten by Italy's state export insurer.

The buyer is 21st Century Food & Packaging, a unit of Dewji's MeTL Group and one of the country's biggest millers. The supplier is AGI EMEA, a firm based in Italy's Emilia region that designs and builds grain storage plants and handling systems for granular products. The equipment is destined for a cereals storage facility at Bandari, Tanzania.

The transaction was insured by SACE, the export credit agency owned by Italy's finance ministry, through a tool it calls Supplier Credit. The mechanism lets an exporter offer a foreign buyer extended payment terms while SACE covers the risk that the buyer fails to pay or that political events disrupt the deal. It is a common way to grease large cross-border equipment sales.

For SACE, the contract is a proof point. The agency said the order grew directly out of its Push Strategy programme in Tanzania, an effort it has run alongside MeTL to connect the Tanzanian conglomerate with Italian suppliers. It described the deal as turning a dialogue with a major international buyer into a concrete export contract, and as opening fresh business for Italian supply chains.

The wider frame is Italian foreign policy. SACE said it had strengthened the push through its Africa Task Force, launched in the wake of the Mattei Plan, the flagship Africa strategy of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government. Under that plan, SACE has offered free insurability opinions on Supplier Credit deals across the 18 African countries the plan covers, in a bid to steer more Italian companies onto the continent.

The buyer sits at the heart of MeTL's food business. 21st Century Food & Packaging runs the group's wheat and maize milling, an operation that traces back to 2005, when MeTL took over the state-owned National Milling Corporation. The company overhauled the plant in 2011 and now mills about 1,250 tonnes of wheat and 300 tonnes of maize a day, accounting for more than a quarter of Tanzania's flour market and employing over 500 people.

The plant already trades well beyond Tanzania. The company exports most of its milling byproducts, including wheat and maize bran, to buyers in the Middle East, where they are used as animal feed, and MeTL says its food division reaches customers across Eastern and Southern Africa.

The silos address a basic constraint. Storage capacity determines how much grain a miller can hold between harvests and imports, smoothing supply and cushioning price swings in a business exposed to both. Expanding it at Bandari points to MeTL preparing to handle larger volumes through its milling chain.

The purchase fits the way Dewji has built the group. MeTL manufactures at scale behind Tanzania's import barriers, then leans on its distribution network to move goods across the region, and it has repeatedly turned to foreign lenders and export agencies to finance the machinery that expansion requires. A modest equipment order like this one is routine for a group of its size, but it is the kind of deal that keeps its factories running.

MeTL is among the largest industrial groups in East Africa. Founded as a trading business by Dewji's father, Gulamabbas Dewji, it now spans agribusiness, consumer goods, textiles, logistics, energy and distribution, operates in about 11 African countries and employs tens of thousands of people. Dewji has said he wants to grow the workforce substantially over the coming years.

He is one of the continent's most recognisable business figures. Forbes estimates his fortune at about $1.9 billion, and he has often been described as the youngest billionaire in Africa. A former member of Tanzania's parliament for Singida, he took the Giving Pledge, committing to give away at least half his wealth, and he owns the Simba SC football club in Dar es Salaam.

His profile carries a darker chapter. In October 2018, Dewji was kidnapped by armed men outside a Dar es Salaam hotel gym and held for nine days before being released, an ordeal that drew international attention and shook the country's business community. No ransom was ever confirmed and the case has never been fully resolved publicly.

What the Bandari deal represents is small in isolation and telling in aggregate. It is another link in a strategy that pairs MeTL's manufacturing muscle with foreign financing and equipment, and another sign that governments from Rome to Beijing increasingly see Dewji's group as their entry point into the Tanzanian market.