By Olurede Yishau
ALIKO DANGOTEE has spent decades answering the question, “How much money can one man make?” with the sort of figures that make ordinary human beings check whether they have accidentally entered a different currency.
Now, however, Dangote is asking another question: “Who get money make I continue dey make money?”
And the answer, apparently, is you. Yes, you, the Nigerian who has been complaining about petrol prices. You, the businessman struggling with diesel. You, the young graduate who has never owned one share on the Nigerian Exchange. You, the diaspora Nigerian sending dollars home. And, if the plan works as advertised, millions of Africans. Dangote is in the public market.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals business is set for what is expected to be Africa’s biggest initial public offering. The offer is for 4.1 billion shares at ₦525 each, potentially raising roughly $5 billion. The offer is scheduled to run from September 14 to October 13, with the shares expected to begin trading later in the year. So, in the language of the streets popularised by Burna Boy: Dangote still dey find money o.
Before anybody misunderstands the joke, this is not because Dangote is broke. Far from it.
This is because big business has a peculiar appetite. The bigger the machine, the more money it needs to keep moving. And Dangote’s machine has become so ambitious that even billions of dollars now look less like a fortune and more like working capital.
Consider what he has built. The refinery in Lekki is already operating at around 700,000 barrels per day. It has become one of the biggest industrial projects in Africa and has fundamentally changed Nigeria’s position in the regional petroleum market. Nigeria, once famous for exporting crude and importing refined fuel, is increasingly exporting petroleum products.
And Dangote is looking at this gigantic refinery and apparently saying: “E never big enough.”
The plan is to double capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2029. The expansion programme is estimated at $14.3 billion. There are also plans for more petrochemical capacity, additional infrastructure and a new refinery project in Kenya.
That is not expansion. That is somebody looking at an elephant and asking whether it can become a blue whale. But here is where the story becomes more interesting. Dangote is not simply raising money because he wants to build another gigantic plant. He is raising money because the economics of modern industrial capitalism have changed.
You don’t necessarily want to own 100 per cent of everything. You want to own enough to control it, while allowing millions of other people to own a piece of it and provide capital for the next stage.
That is what the refinery IPO represents. It is, in part, Dangote telling Nigerians: come and enter the room.
For years, Nigerians have complained that the country’s biggest businesses are controlled by a handful of wealthy families and institutions. Now one of Africa’s most valuable industrial assets is being opened to public shareholders.
The offer is deliberately being marketed as a “people’s IPO”, with the company targeting millions of retail investors. That sounds attractive. But Nigerians should not confuse an opportunity to invest with an invitation to donate. An IPO is not charity. Dangote is not sharing the refinery because he has suddenly developed an allergy to money. He is selling shares because capital has a price, and because bringing outside shareholders into the business can provide the financing and credibility required for the next phase of expansion. The investor, in return, gets a claim on the future profits of the business. And that future is precisely what investors must interrogate.
The refinery has already demonstrated that it can make serious money. Its prospectus shows an after-tax profit of $1.82 billion in the first half of 2026, a dramatic turnaround from a $476 million loss recorded for the whole of 2025. Those numbers are spectacular. But spectacular numbers can also make people careless.
Part of the refinery’s extraordinary performance this year has come during a period of severe disruption to global refining and fuel supply caused by conflicts involving Iran and Ukraine. Those disruptions have tightened fuel markets and lifted refining margins. Dangote has been sitting in a very advantageous position as a modern, large-scale refinery when the world suddenly needs more refined petroleum products.
The question for investors is simple: What happens when the war premium disappears?Dangote’s management argues that the supply problems may persist beyond the current geopolitical crisis because damaged refineries must be repaired and global inventories rebuilt. That may well be true. But investors should still distinguish between a business’s structural strength and a temporary windfall. There is another headache: crude oil.
A refinery without crude is like a restaurant without food. Beautiful building, plenty equipment, no dinner.
Dangote’s refinery has not always been able to obtain enough Nigerian crude at competitive prices. Reuters reported recently that roughly 30% to 40% of the refinery’s crude intake has been imported, partly because of availability and pricing problems in the domestic market. That is one of the great Nigerian ironies. We produce crude oil. We build a huge refinery to process crude oil. And then the refinery imports crude oil. Why?
Because economics, logistics, contracts, pricing formulas and the complicated structure of Nigeria’s oil industry do not disappear simply because Dangote has built a giant refinery. Government is now considering reforms to improve domestic crude supply to local refiners, including changes that could reduce logistics costs and make domestic barrels more competitive.
If those reforms work, Dangote benefits. But Nigeria benefits too. That is the part of this story that deserves more attention than the billionaire jokes. Dangote’s refinery is no longer merely Dangote’s personal business project. It is becoming part of Nigeria’s economic infrastructure.
If it consistently produces fuel for Nigeria and the wider African market, Nigeria can save foreign exchange, increase exports and develop industries around refining, petrochemicals, logistics and shipping.
That is potentially transformative. But there is another lesson here. Dangote is not betting everything on refining.
His cement business remains a formidable cash-generating machine. Dangote Cement reported 2025 group revenue of about ₦4.31 trillion, with EBITDA of about ₦1.98 trillion, according to the company’s investor-relations figures. Its total installed capacity stands at 55 million tonnes annually. Dangote Cement. And there are plans for a secondary London listing of Dangote Cement, another indication that the group is looking increasingly towards international capital markets.
Then comes Kenya. Dangote intends to finance a proposed 700,000-barrel-per-day refinery there through a combination of internal cash, bonds and IPO financing. The project could take about three years and would become the group’s biggest refining investment outside Nigeria. Read that again. Internal cash. Bonds. IPO. That is how modern empires are financed. Not necessarily by one billionaire sitting on a mountain of cash, but by constantly recycling capital, raising new money, attracting investors and putting yesterday’s profits into tomorrow’s projects.
So when we joke and say, “Dangote still dey find money,” we are actually describing one of the most important principles of capitalism: Money likes to reproduce. The rich do not become richer merely because they have money. They become richer because they understand that idle money is less useful than invested money. The real question for Nigeria is whether ordinary Nigerians can participate meaningfully in that process.
The refinery IPO could become a landmark moment if it creates millions of genuine shareholders rather than simply becoming another transaction dominated by institutions and wealthy investors.
But retail investors must do their homework. Don’t buy because Dangote is Africa’s richest man. Don’t buy because your neighbour says the shares will “skyrocket”. Don’t buy because somebody on WhatsApp promises guaranteed returns.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has already warned Nigerians about fake and unauthorised Dangote refinery investment solicitations and advised investors to rely only on formal regulatory and company announcements. Read the prospectus. Understand the valuation. Study the risks. Look at the company’s debts, costs, margins, crude supply arrangements and expansion requirements.
My final take: Dangote is still finding money. But if you are going to give him yours, you too must ‘find’ sense. And perhaps that is the real story. For years, Dangote’s success has been presented as the story of one extraordinary Nigerian who built factories nobody else dared to build. The next chapter could be different. It could be the story of whether millions of ordinary Nigerians can stop merely watching Nigerian wealth being created and start owning a small piece of it.
Quote
Dangote is still finding money. But if you are going to give him yours, you too must find sense. And perhaps that is the real story. For years, Dangote’s success has been presented as the story of one extraordinary Nigerian who built factories nobody else dared to build. The next chapter could be different. It could be the story of whether millions of ordinary Nigerians can stop merely watching Nigerian wealth being created and start owning a small piece of it.
—
