Dangote Group to Create 250,000 Jobs

Ololade Adeyanju/

The Dangote group, owned by Africa’s richest man, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has embarked on six major projects, that will create about 250, 000 jobs and provide foreign exchange earnings and savings of about $15 billion.

One of the projects is the $12 billion Dangote Oil Refinery, which will be the largest single train petroleum refinery in the world, with a production capacity of about 650,000 barrels per day.

Dangote told some media executives and MBA graduates from the Lagos Business School, during a tour of the refinery, over the weekend, the refinery would create 60,000 jobs with 20,000 of them onsite.

The refinery is scheduled to open in 2019 and will be 40 percent larger than the current largest refinery, which only has a capacity of 450, 000 barrels per day.

The plant will also house Africa’s largest urea plant with a capacity of 3 million tons per annum, as well as 1,100kms of sub sea pipeline infrastructure to handle 3 billion SCF of gas per day.

Located in the Lekki Free Trade Zone, Lagos, the refinery is set on about 2100 hectares of land.

The refinery will create its own power, which will run on natural gas with a projected supply of 12, 000 MW of power that will be readily available for commercial use.

“We believe the best time to invest is during a downturn and it is our goal to diversify the Nigerian economy and as a result we have also increased our investment in agriculture and agro processing with projections of producing 1 million MT of milled and parboiled rice”, Dangote told the visitors.