Dangote boosts Africa plan to $60bn as he starts new build

Aliko Dangote raised his pledge for investment to industrialise Africa by a fifth to $60 billion by the end of the decade, as the continent’s richest man broke ground on a new fuel depot that will expand his empire in the south.

“We also put our money on the table — it’s not just about saying things,” he told reporters in Walvis Bay, Namibia after opening the site of a planned fuel depot in the country. From “2030 to 2035, we’re rolling out an even bigger one and I’m sure others will join us,” he added.

Dangote announced his group’s more ambitious target after he broke ground on a tank farm outside Walvis Bay that’s part of a $2.5 billion investment that includes a 1 700-kilometer (1 056-mile) pipeline planned through neighbouring Botswana and South Africa and potentially other countries.

The storage facility will take 18 months at most to complete, he said.

Having already made a fortune selling commodities from sugar to cement, Dangote has launched projects this year across the continent to build his fuel business. He’s announced more than $35 billion-worth of infrastructure projects, nearly three quarters of his original $50 billion expansion plan through the end of the decade.

“We want to heavily invest so that most of the landlocked countries will be able to access petroleum products at a cheaper price,” the billionaire said Wednesday at the groundbreaking event for the fuel-storage project just outside Walvis Bay.

“Your petroleum prices will be much much cheaper than where they are,” Dangote said among sand dunes about 10 kilometres east of Walvis Bay. The project will “strengthen Namibia’s energy security and advance regional trade and industrial development across southern Africa.”

Doubling the capacity of his Lagos refinery to a total of 1.4 million barrels a day in three years is well underway, as Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE makes a windfall profit from oil shocks caused by the US-Israeli war with Iran.

Part of Dangote’s vision is to ship some of the fuel made in Nigeria from what will rival the world’s largest refinery when his expansion is complete.

Namibia has a small population of around 3 million and like many other African nations is looking for ways to avoid potential fuel shortages in the wake of the war.

The pipeline investment will comprise about 4 million barrels of storage capacity, with 360 million litres for diesel and 240 million litres for gasoline, Dangote said.

Governments have struck exclusive supply deals with traders including Vitol Group with the aim of avoiding outages. Landlocked Botswana is negotiating to buy fuel from a wide range of sources including Oman and Dangote to safeguard its supply.

Even before the war, trucking companies constructed custom trailers to haul diesel from Namibia inland to mining areas in the region and bring copper back.

Dangote’s tank farm and pipeline can potentially bring fuel closer to the mines and increase competition among fuel distributors.

Elsewhere on the continent, Dangote Group is developing fuel-storage facilities and a pipeline linking Djibouti and Ethiopia. It is also considering a separate pipeline to carry fuel from its planned Lamu refinery in Kenya to Ethiopia. Cameroon is also slated for another Dangote infrastructure project.

© 2026 Bloomberg