The Lagos Business School has led members of its Global CEO Africa programme on a visit to the $20bn Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Lagos.
The participants, drawn from across the continent, were received recently at the plant by the President of the Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, who used the occasion to urge indigenous investors to retain their resources within Africa.
The Global CEO Africa programme is one of Lagos Business School’s flagship initiatives aimed at grooming senior executives from across Africa.
The Dean of the Lagos Business School, Prof Yinka David-West, led the chief executive officers to the facility in collaboration with the Academic Director of the LBS Global CEO Programme, Patrick Akinwuntan.
According to the LBS Dean, the team was at the facility to see the power of private sector investment in Africa. David-West stressed that the CEOs have seen for themselves the power of vision and leadership.
She appreciated Dangote for leading the way as far as African development is concerned. “On behalf of the Lagos Business School and the GCEO Africa Programme 5, I think it is only right to say a big thank you.
“We are not thanking you for just the visit, we are thanking you for paving the way and showing us what Africa can do. You’ve said it all. Nobody is going to work for us if we don’t work for ourselves. We need to support one another, we are one Africa, we need to do it all by ourselves,” the LBS Dean stated.
Addressing the CEOs after a tour of the refinery, Dangote recalled how he decided to build the $20bn refinery to make Nigeria and Africa self-sufficient in energy security.
According to him, building a refinery is not similar to building a house, saying he would not have started the project if he had known the difficulties involved. However, he expressed confidence that the completion of the facility has shown that nothing is impossible.
“People believe building a refinery is like building a house, but, like what I keep saying, if I knew what we were going to face, I wouldn’t have started it at all. So, the luck that we’ve had now as a group was because we didn’t know what we were getting into, really, and we believe that nothing is impossible,” he said.
Dangote noted that as the project got deeper, the group was faced with whether to stop and sink or continue and succeed. “So, we have to push and continue to make sure that we deliver,” he said.
Dangote said a refinery in Africa became expedient because many countries on the continent relied on fuel imports. “Apart from Algeria and Libya, which are self-sufficient in Africa, technically, everybody is an importer,” he said
Dangote said he was unapologetic in saying that some foreign actors were attacking all industries through importation.
“If you go to Lome, you will see a massive number of ships. That’s what they do to attack all the industries in sub-Saharan Africa. Even if you look at the refineries in South Africa, they are actually not operating. Only one is now operating in South Africa, but we were able to take this risk.
In his words, the Academic Director of the Global CEO Africa programme at the Lagos Business School, Akinwuntan, said the refinery represents the fact that vision is deeper than sight. Akinwuntan congratulated the richest man in Africa for succeeding in building the largest single-train refinery.
“For this type of project, the largest single-train refinery in the world, that’s beyond what you see, it’s what you envision. The capacity and the audacity of Alhaji Dangote to bring that vision into reality means every time he can imagine that and every time he sees a problem, he thinks of how to solve it rather than get scared away from the magnitude of the problem,” he stated.
Akinwuntan added that the Global CEO programme was to build the leadership DNA to transform Africa within the context of Africa operating as one market.
He noted that the programme was to empower Pan-African multinationals through business leadership development. “We have 24 CEOs from six countries in Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and they span across various sectors, banking and finance, construction, information technology and the public sector.
“The whole idea is we’ve come to the Dangote refinery to have a first-hand experience of dreaming big and executing with courage at a level of excellence that is world-class,” he added.
