Business, News, Society

Dangote’s Passion Revealed

aliko-dangoteChairman, Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote has a passion that millions of Nigerians don’t know… “The issue is that we have more challenging headwinds. I need to get those out of the way first and start having tailwinds. Then I’ll focus on this. It’s not about buying Arsenal and just continuing with business as usual. It’s about buying Arsenal and turning it around.”

“I’ve run a very successful business and I think I can also run a very successful team. Right now, with what we’re facing, over 20billion dollars of projects, I cannot do both.”

Aliko Dangote GCON (born 10 April 1957) is a Nigerian billionaire, who owns the Dangote Group, which has interests in commodities. The company operates in Nigeria and other African countries, including Benin, Ethiopia, Senegal, Cameroon, Ghana, South Africa, Togo, Tanzania, and Zambia. As of June 2016, he had an estimated net worth of US$14.9 billion.

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Dangote is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 67th richest person in the world and the richest in Africa; he peaked on the list as the 23rd richest person in the world in 2014. He surpassed Saudi-Ethiopian billionaire Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi in 2013 by over $2.6 billion to become the world’s richest person of African descent.

Dangote hails from a very prominent business family. He is the great grandson of Alhaji Alhassan Dantata, the richest African at the time of his death in 1955. Aliko Dangote, an ethnic Hausa Muslim from Kano State, was born on 10 April 1957 into a wealthy Muslim family. Dangote said, “I can remember when I was in primary school, I would go and buy cartons of sweets and I would start selling them just to make money. I was so interested in business, even at that time.”

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The Dangote Group was established as a small trading firm in 1977. Today, it is a multi-trillion naira conglomerate with many of its operations in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo. Dangote has expanded to cover food processing, cement manufacturing, and freight. The Dangote Group also dominates the sugar market in Nigeria and is a major supplier to the country’s soft drink companies, breweries, and confectioners. The Dangote Group has moved from being a trading company to being the largest industrial group in Nigeria including Dangote Sugar Refinery, Dangote Cement, and Dangote Flour.