News
Dangote: With new refinery, we’ll boost Nigeria’s economy by $20billion
Nigeria may take a breather from the twin issues of crisis in the production and distribution of petroleum products and rising cost of dollars, if the words of Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, who promised to tackle them, become real.
Dangote, owner of the Dangote Refinery, Nigeria’s first private initiative in processing crude on a large scale and Africa’s largest in terms of capacity, was quoted as saying that with the planned commencement of the refinery located in Lagos, Nigeria could save up to $10 billion in foreign exchange (FX) and generate another $10 billion in exports when the facility begins operation.
The 650,000 barrels per day, also reputed to be the world’s largest single-train refinery, is set for inauguration on May 22, by President Muhammadu Buhari.
The business magnate, who spoke in an interview with a special edition of London-based The Economists Magazine, entitled: The World Ahead 2023’which was unveiled with considerable focus on West Africa and aimed to highlight both the potential as well as areas for improvement in Africa, was quoted as saying Nigeria currently imports over 90 per cent of its refined petroleum products, which amounted to roughly $10 billion in imports in 2022.
While this has brought major benefits to many businesses, Dangote explained that more prosperity could be created by locally refining Nigeria’s resources, with the refinery being a major step in this direction by reducing the country’s dependence on imported refined petroleum products.
“The refinery’s completion will not only create direct and indirect jobs, but also lead to skills transfer and technology acquisition opportunities that will benefit the downstream sector.
“Moreover, the refinery’s production of critical products like naphtha and polypropylene will stimulate the development of other industries, such as cosmetics, plastics, and textiles. Refineries on this scale could save Nigeria up to $10 billion in foreign exchange and generate approximately $10 billion from exports.
“We see room for development of added value in agribusiness too. Here, initiatives like our Sugar Backward Integration Projects look to create a strong localised supply in the sugar industry. With a goal to produce around 0.5 million tons of sugar per annum from locally grown sugar cane, benefits will be created across the sugar value chain for local suppliers,” he added.
He noted that the soon-to-be commissioned 650,000 barrels per day refinery in Lagos, would enable Nigeria achieve self-sufficiency in refined petroleum products, as well as export to other African markets.
According to him, there are also ample opportunities to increase the country’s rice production, with the ongoing construction of six rice mills that could mill approximately one million tons per annum of locally produced rice, thereby empowering local farmers.
The renowned businessman pointed out that the group of companies also has a 2.8 million tons per annum fertiliser plant tapping into the fertiliser market, while opportunities are being explored in tomato cultivation and processing as well as dairy production.
“With many parts of West Africa still facing food insecurity, the emergence of strong localised industries with resourceful suppliers and clear trade networks will be a big step in the right direction,” he maintained.
Dangote stressed that Nigeria presents an attractive investment opportunity for international investors, saying with the country’s abundance of natural resources, diversifying and digitising economy, youthful demographics and vibrant society, investors will find in Nigeria a country of many possibilities.
“Its population of over 200 million — of which 40 per cent is under the age of 15 – means the country’s demographic dividend offers investors with a long-term view an encouraging option in several sectors.
“Nigeria has a variety of untapped natural resources which, for commodity-driven investors, offers options in the upstream, midstream, and downstream segments. Its vast arable land and favourable climatic conditions similarly support a wide range of crops, positioning it as an auspicious destination for agriculture-based investments.
“Here, we expect to see the development of a strong, home-grown agribusiness industry. We are also seeing the emergence of a strong digital economy, with several Nigerian start-ups becoming vibrant players in their respective tech-fields.
“Nigeria’s import dependency and reliance on foreign markets presents major prospects for import substitution and supply chain localisation. Across various consumer-goods sectors of the economy, as well as supply-side needs for commercial and industrial enterprises, there are different options to set up localised supply networks,” he argued.
With the conclusion of the recent elections, Dangote explained that he was looking forward to government taking proactive steps to enable and empower investment by the private sector as the country has a variety of opportunities for businesses to work alongside the government through Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in infrastructure development.
On opportunities provided by the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), Dangote stated that the initiative has the strong support of many businesses across Africa with different private sector leaders actively involved in the process leading up to its signing and ratification.
Within the context of manufacturer’s associations and industrial groups, which he said he participated in, Dangote explained that he saw the willingness of African governments to engage with the private sector so they can hear what ingredients are needed to unlock increased intra-Africa trade.
In looking to opportunities for exports from a strong base such as Nigeria, the cement industry, he said, could benefit greatly from not only exporting cement to burgeoning construction markets across the continent, but could look to build cement plants in other markets.
Driven by population growth, urbanisation, infrastructure development, and housing demand, he noted that Africa’s cement consumption has considerable room for growth as evidenced by its per-capita cement consumption of 130kg, far behind the global average of 541kg.
“Sub-Saharan Africa presents an opportunity for expansion, as its population is projected to grow from 1.1 billion to over 2.1 billion by 2050, with two thirds of this growth in urban areas. Nigeria currently has an installed cement production capacity of about 54m tons/pa, which exceeds local demand and so a lot of this can be exported across Africa.
“Governments and businesses need to work together to improve competitiveness, dismantle barriers to accessing markets and develop supportive industrial policies. It is also important for countries to understand the potential revenue loss from the elimination of tariffs and develop strategies around tariff revenue gaps.
“Additionally, effective monitoring and enforcement of rules of origin is essential to ensure that products traded within the market originate from within the continent. By forging partnerships, businesses and governments can collaborate to overcome these challenges and maximise the potential benefits of initiatives like AfCFTA,” he explained.
As a key player in Africa’s push towards self-sufficiency in the cement industry, he disclosed that the group has an installed production capacity of approximately 51 million tons per annum across 10 African countries.
In addition, he noted that the group’s newly inaugurated urea plant in Lagos, with a capacity of 2.8 million tons per annum, not only ensures a secure supply of fertiliser for Nigeria, but also allows for exports.
On climate change, Dangote said businesses should actively look to integrate sustainable practices throughout their operations while embedding an awareness among staff of how business activities impact the socioeconomic realities of stakeholders.
By prioritising energy efficiency, water conservation, waste management and emissions control, he posited that companies could look to alternative fuel sources, energy-saving initiatives and waste management protocols as easy wins to benefit stakeholders.
Expressing his views on expectations for the creation of value-added industries in Africa, the richest black man in the world stated that Nigeria’s economy as presently constituted has largely been built around the extraction and exportation of its natural wealth.
Columns
The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay
Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.
Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.
Late Prof. Edward Said
I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.
I. The Seed Planted in a Library
When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.
Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.
Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.
•Late Antonio Gramsci
II. The Book C.Don Handed Me
Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.
And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.
As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.
Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.
These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.
Late Sigmund Freud
III. The Question That Started Everything
When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.
At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.
The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.
The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.
Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself
I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.
The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.
Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.
•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Abubakar Rabe, retired Major General former spokesman of the Nigerian Army who was abducted by bandits in Katsina State exactly two weeks ago, has died in captivity, reports coming from the state, one of the hotbeds of terrorist activities in Nigeria, confirmed on Saturday.
The retired senior military officer was kidnapped alongside his wife around the Matazu area of Katsina State while traveling to attend a wedding ceremony, was said to have died of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure in the camp of his abductors.
Nasiru Mu’azu, Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, in the state, who confirmed the incident, in a statement, said the government received the news with heavy heart and deep sense of loss.
He wrote: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy.
“The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension. His abduction and subsequent death are not only a loss to his family and Katsina State but a monumental loss to the entire country.
“His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Katsina State Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, PhD, CON, extends his deepest condolences to the family of the late General and the country at-large.
“The Governor has described this incident as a “dark moment” and a reminder of the urgent need for a collective and intensified front against the criminal elements threatening the peace of our communities.
“The Katsina State Government remains committed to working with the Federal Government and security forces to ensure that those responsible for this heinous act are brought to justice. We assure the citizens of Katsina State that our resolve to eliminate banditry and ensure the safety of all residents remains unshaken.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family during this difficult time. May the soul of the departed Retired Major General Rabe Abdulakdir rest in eternal peace.”
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