Aliko Dangote says he pledged all his assets and gave a personal guarantee to secure $3.7 billion for his refinery project.
Africa’s wealthiest man Aliko Dangote has revealed that he put all his assets up as collateral and gave a personal guarantee to secure the initial $3.7 billion loan used to finance the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and fertiliser projects, describing the investment as the biggest risk of his business career.
Speaking in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with ARISE News, Dangote said the scale of the projects meant he effectively placed the business empire he had spent decades building behind the decision to construct them.
Asked about the biggest risk he had taken in nearly five decades as an entrepreneur, Dangote pointed immediately to the refinery and fertiliser investments.
“The biggest decision was the risk of the refinery and fertiliser,” he said.
Dangote said financing the projects required him to pledge everything he had built at the time.
“We gave all our assets as collateral,” he said.
“And apart from that, I gave a personal guarantee.”
According to Dangote, the initial financing involved a $3.7 billion loan at a time when the eventual scale, cost and completion of the projects were far from certain.
The refinery would eventually cost about $20 billion to build, making it one of the largest private industrial investments undertaken in Africa.
For Dangote, however, the significance of the investment was not simply its eventual size, but the extent of his personal exposure if the project failed.
His comments offer a glimpse into the financial risk behind a refinery that has since become central to Nigeria’s attempt to reduce its longstanding dependence on imported petroleum products.
The 700,000-barrel-per-day facility began producing petroleum products in 2024 and has subsequently expanded operations across petrol, diesel, aviation fuel and other products.
Dangote is now pursuing a further $14.3 billion expansion intended to double the refinery’s capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2029.
The refinery also opened its landmark public offer this week, giving retail and institutional investors an opportunity to take ownership in a business that had until now been overwhelmingly privately held.
Dangote told ARISE News that the transition towards broader ownership represents a new phase for the company, after years in which he and his businesses carried much of the financial risk associated with developing it.
He has described the offer as a “People’s IPO”, saying his ambition is eventually to have at least 10 million shareholders across Africa.
But the billionaire said his willingness to take enormous risks was rooted in a broader conviction that Africa could not industrialise without entrepreneurs prepared to commit capital to large-scale projects.
Elsewhere in the interview, Dangote said many African entrepreneurs had become “scared to death” of making major industrial investments because of policy uncertainty.
Asked why more wealthy Africans were not taking risks similar to his, he replied: “Everybody is not Aliko, who wants to fight every day.”
“I fight every day, morning, day and night,” Dangote said. “It has become part of me now. I enjoy fighting.”
Demola Ojo
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