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Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man, has raised his group's planned investment across the continent to $70 billion and said he is considering a 10,000-megawatt power programme in Africa, the latest step in a fast-growing list of projects outside Nigeria.
The new target is $10 billion more than the $60 billion figure Dangote gave on Nov. 4, when he launched a fuel storage and pipeline project in Namibia. Dangote, president and chief executive officer of Dangote Industries Ltd., said the power programme would span Africa and could include Nigeria.
He has not said where the plants would be built, how they would be financed or when they would start.
From $50 billion to $70 billion
The target has climbed quickly. Dangote's group had planned to invest about $50 billion in African industry by the end of the decade before he raised that to $60 billion at the launch of a tank farm near Walvis Bay, Namibia, earlier this month.
The Namibian project is part of a $2.5 billion plan that includes a 1,700-kilometer pipeline running through Botswana and South Africa and storage for about 4 million barrels of fuel, with completion expected within 18 months. The group's announced projects across Africa already add up to more than $35 billion, including a planned 700,000-barrel-a-day refinery in Kenya.
A return to power
Electricity has become a recurring theme for the billionaire this year. In May, during a conversation at the International Finance Corp.'s headquarters in Washington, he said: "We are now going into power, 20,000 megawatts." In June, his group outlined plans for a port and a 2,000-megawatt power plant in Tanzania, and in September he set a target of more than $10 billion of investment in power.
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, has about 13,000 megawatts of installed generating capacity, but the national grid often delivers barely a quarter of that, leaving factories and homes to run on diesel generators. Dangote's own plants, including his refinery and cement factories, generate much of their own electricity.
The power plans come as Dangote pushes for more industrial investment at home. This week he told Nigeria's petroleum explorers in Lagos that reliable electricity, affordable long-term loans and local supply chains are the building blocks of industrial growth.
Cash from the refinery sale
Dangote is preparing to raise fresh capital from the stock market. The initial public offering of his 650,000-barrel-a-day refinery in the Lekki Free Zone near Lagos drew about ₦5.85 trillion ($4.3 billion) in applications from nearly 3.8 million investors, close to three times what the company sought, in the largest share sale in Africa's history.
Dangote, 69, built his fortune in cement, sugar, salt and flour before moving into fertilizer and oil refining. He controls Dangote Cement Plc, the continent's biggest cement maker. Forbes and Bloomberg both rank him as Africa's richest person.
Figures were converted at ₦1,365 to the dollar.
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