Africa’s richest man and President, Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, is diversifying his group’s investments in Cameroon, starting with energy.
“We have plans to expand our investment to other sectors beginning with oil and gas,” Bloomberg quoted Dangote as telling reporters on Wednesday, after meeting Cameroonian President Paul Biya in the capital, Yaoundé.
He didn’t provide further details.
He also announced that his company will double cement production in Cameroon.
Dangote opened a 1.5 million-ton cement grinding facility in the central African nation in March 2015 that ended a 40-year French monopoly in the industry.
Dangote Refinery, situated in Lagos, is expected to become operational by the first quarter of 2022. When completed, it will have the capacity to process about 650,000 barrels per day of crude oil, making it the largest single-train refinery in the world.
Dangote had on Tuesday said his company’s new fertiliser plant would export its first shipment in late June or early July, to Louisiana, in the United States, while the majority of exports from the plant would go to Brazil.
The new plant at the Lekki Free Zone in Lagos State, designed to manufacture three million tonnes of urea per year will also supply all the major markets in sub-Saharan Africa, Reuters quoted Dangote to have said during a virtual economic forum hosted by Qatar.
“Apart from meeting the domestic demand, we are going to be able to earn quite a lot of money exporting the goods to the South American countries,” he had said.
The company’s fertiliser hit the market this month.
Dangote had during a recent tour of the plant this month, stated that the company would start exporting fertiliser and would help improve forex earnings for Nigeria.
Many in Nigeria also hope the Dangote plant will help alleviate chronically low crop yields in Nigeria, which are partly due to insufficient access to fertiliser.
According to the World Bank, Nigeria consumed around 20 kg of fertiliser per hectare of arable land in 2018, compared with 73 kg in South Africa and 393 kg in China.
Hamid Ayodeji with agency report
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