Africa’s refinery moment: Dangote fuels the dream of a self-sufficient continent
HISTORY does not always announce itself. Sometimes it arrives in the form of an oil tanker departing the Lagos coastline, bound not for Houston or Rotterdam, but for Accra, Dar es Salaam, or Douala. When Aliko Dangote stood before cameras at his sprawling Ibeju-Lekki refinery and declared that he could supply "West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa," he was not merely making a business statement. He was articulating, perhaps without quite intending to, the most compelling pan-African argument of our era: that this continent, so long defined by what it exports raw and imports processed, is beginning - haltingly,…
