Nigeria’s president summons Aliko Dangote over supplies to new refinery

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Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has summoned Aliko Dangote to an emergency meeting with oil industry officials and regulators on Tuesday to discuss supplying the industrialist’s new $20bn refinery with crude.

The meeting in Nigeria’s capital Abuja follows months of speculation that Dangote, the country’s wealthiest man, had fallen out with the president and the state oil company, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, which has not been supplying his refinery with enough crude.

This month, in a sign of a thaw in relations, NNPC agreed to supply 365,000 barrels a day of crude to be paid for in naira. But terms have yet to finalised.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Dangote said: “We’re meeting to make sure everything is put together. There are a lot of issues about the exchange rate and pricing.”

Dangote said his refinery, Nigeria’s biggest infrastructure project in decades, was already producing 420,000 b/d after coming online earlier this year and would reach its capacity of 650,000 b/d by the second quarter of next year. The exact state of production at the refinery has been shrouded in secrecy.

Dangote said he could supply the country’s entire petrol requirement, which he estimated at 30mn to 35mn litres a day.

The meeting, confirmed by the Nigerian presidency, had been called to discuss “the modalities” of supplying Dangote’s refinery with crude and Nigeria’s market with petrol, Dangote said. Although he would sell petrol at market prices, he said, the price might be fixed quarter-by-quarter to avoid excessive volatility at the pump.

Dangote has spent nearly a decade building the 650,000-barrel-a-day refinery, the biggest of its kind in the world, on swampland outside Lagos. The idea was to end what he said was an “absurd” situation in which Africa’s biggest oil producer imported almost all of its refined petroleum products because of a lack of refining capacity in the country.

But he claimed an “oil mafia” was trying to scupper his plans. “There are lots of vested interests. They’ve been making millions of dollars” Dangote said, referring to traders exporting Nigerian crude and importing refined products.

“They will fight to see how they can stop us,” he added.

He also accused unnamed traders of flooding the west African market via Lomé port in Togo with cheap diesel mixed with chemicals, as well as with Russian oil, in an effort to undercut prices.

“I don’t want to name them x, y, z,” he said. “They are selling on credit, without guarantee. They are doing everything so that they don’t buy from us. It’s working in a way, but we will definitely survive.”

Dangote denied that he had fallen out with Tinubu after months of rumours that the president, who came to power in 2023, has not been as supportive of his businesses as his predecessors. There was no bad blood between them, Dangote insisted, adding that they had recently dined together in Paris. “If you have a problem with somebody, the person will not entertain you for two and a half hours,” he said.

Dangote also rejected accusations, including from the head of the petroleum regulatory authority, that he was a monopolist. Such allegations, he said, had made him think twice about moving into power and steel, the possible next stages for his business empire, which began with salt, sugar and cement.

“If I keep on investing I will run into trouble one day because I will end up owning everything,” he said.