Aliko Dangote: Africa’s richest person

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Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Every episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Zing Singh, and I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode, we have someone who is Africa's richest person by quite a long shot.

A title he has held for 13 years in a row.

He's 67 years old.

He's the world's richest black billionaire.

And his name is Aliko Dangate and he made his money as one of those kind of classic industrialists you just don't really hear about anymore.

Yeah, kind of an old-fashioned industrial story.

He started out trading cement and he made his fortune through sugar, salt, flour, and fertilizer.

And together, all his companies make up a whopping third of Nigeria's total public market value, which, Simon, I think you should probably explain.

Okay, so if you think of the American Stock Exchange, the SP 500, the 500 biggest companies in America, the biggest one of all is Microsoft.

That makes up about 7%

of the S ⁇ P 500, roughly the same as Apple, which is around 7%.

So huge companies, they make up 7%.

His companies make up 30%

of the Nigerian stock exchange, if you like, the publicly traded Nigerian companies.

So he accounts for an enormous, huge chunk of the market value of Nigeria.

And understandably, that's also laid him him open to allegations that he monopolizes everything, right?

Yeah, he's basically got a huge share of very large industries.

The Dangote Group is one of the biggest employers on the entire continent of Africa.

And we can actually listen to him speaking to the BBC in 2014 discussing his role in developing not just Nigerian but African industry.

You know, nobody will come and develop this economy but only us.

And when we start, the others will see and then they will follow.

But if you turn it the reverse, where we will sit down and we expect foreigners to come and develop our economy in Africa, it will never ever happen.

So we need to take charge.

And that's what we've done, actually.

And that sense of African self-reliance has made him incredibly popular.

That's a message that people really want to hear.

And it's paid off for him.

He's currently worth around $13 billion.

Now, having said that, he does insist on living a relatively simple and unflashy life.

So, for instance, he often drives himself between meetings.

And if you see him in interview, I've watched a couple of them.

He's a pretty mild-mannered, unflashy guy.

There's not much bling about him at all.

Although he does indulge sometimes.

So he has 25 luxury cars.

He's got a 33-metre yacht, which is named after him.

Tiny, 33-meters.

Are you kidding?

Yeah, that's not a lot.

It's 500 feet long, honestly.

He's not going to get very far in the billionaire stakes with a 33-metre yacht.

No, by billionaire stakes, that's like rowing a pedal around, right?

He's got private jets for different occasions and his journey to riches though has been helped along the way by some big political players and that has sometimes left him open to allegations of corruption but we'll dig into a bit deeper is aliko dangoti good bad or just another billionaire let's go back to the beginning

So Iliko was born in 1957 in Nigeria's second largest city, Kano, an ancient trading centre in what is predominantly the Muslim north.

Yeah, and if if you think historically, he was three years old when Nigeria gained independence after over a century of British colonial rule.

So his childhood took place in what was quite a tumultuous time for the country.

That included the civil war, which was between 67 to 70, followed by a succession of military dictatorships and brief democratic civilian governments.

But Aleko was fortunate.

He had the stability of a pretty wealthy family on his mother's side.

His great-grandfather traded nuts with Western companies in the early 20th century and was actually the richest man in West Africa at the time of his death.

This is not a ragster-riches story by any means.

No, he's definitely not coming from nothing.

And Aleko's granddad had actually built on this empire to become the top ground nut trader in Nigeria in the 60s alongside picking up real estate and haulage businesses.

So this is a family that's very well off, actually.

And steeped in commerce and trading.

When Aleko was just nine years old, his father died and so he was actually raised by his grandfather.

But at primary school, he showed a very distinct flair for business, which, you know, does actually pop up quite a lot in some of his billionaires.

So often, there's so many of them started their sort of entrepreneurial career when they were kids.

Yeah, he was buying sweets in bulk and then gave them to other children to sell, delegating, and then taking a cut of their profits.

I mean, I don't think I understood what taking a cut of anything meant when I was that age.

Yeah.

He said, when you're raised by an entrepreneurial parent or grandparent, you pick up that aspiration.

It makes you much more aggressive to think that anything is possible.

Again, that's kind of familiar territory, isn't it, for our billionaires?

Yeah, and I just want to say, if you're a parent and you realize your child is selling sweets on the playground, they could be the next billionaire.

Yeah.

In 1977, Eliko graduated from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.

He got a degree in business studies, of course.

And then he joined his uncle, who was running a cement business.

This will become very important in Nigeria's largest city, Lagos.

Yeah, he said that he squatted in his uncle's office and learned all about cement trading and haulage.

And this was the right place, right time to get into the cement business as the Lagos cement market was frenzied following something called the Cement Armada.

A period in history I must say I was not familiar with, but it's a fascinating story.

Oh yes, I mean cement armada doesn't exactly scream glamour but we'll give you a quick primer on exactly what went down.

So oil had been discovered in Nigeria in the 1950s.

So after the civil war ended in 1970, the Nigerian government were basically very enthusiastic to spend some of that oil profit on infrastructure and defense, you know these big budget projects so the government ordered 20 million tons of cement to be imported within just 12 months that's a lot of cement and understandably it required a lot of ships to come and deliver that cement hence the armada exactly so there were 420 ships oh my gosh that is a lot of ships queuing for months out of lagos harbour some of them were anchored they had to wait up to a year to unload some of them just fell on sank and some were even prey to pirates must say that doesn't sound like the best organised importing exercise I've ever heard.

No, it's a bit like organising a birthday party and telling everyone to turn up at exactly the same time.

So all this meant that some of the concrete degraded.

The importers who had imported it didn't have a usable product.

And actually, this event was studied as a key moment of government corruption as these contracts were handed out without any checks and balances.

It's not just disorganised, it's sort of slightly underhand.

The result of the AMADA, however, was this huge demand for good concrete that hadn't degraded, that had got through the AMADA.

And it was in this boom that Alico was starting his career in concrete.

Yeah, and just remember, Nigeria in the 1970s was becoming a very vibrant place.

For a young man, it became the wealthiest country in Africa.

Thanks to that oil.

Over two decades, government revenue had increased from just 200,000 naira to 3.7 billion.

That is a 1.8 million.

percent increase.

So it is boom time in Nigeria.

And Lagos's population doubled in the 1970s.

You know, this nightlife grew to serve the new workers arriving.

It became known as a party town.

Music and culture was flourishing.

So there were domestic sort of stars.

You may have heard of Fela Kuti, but also international musicians like Stevie Wonder came along to play.

And according to a friend, after working hard all day, Alico would enjoy some late-night house parties.

So he knows how to relax.

Alasugan Edeniyi, a journalist for All African News website, reported that he was also a gambler.

So he said, I have been told that Dangote was so consumed by gambling that he could spend hours without eating just at the gambling table so he's picking up a few bad habits yeah on a trip to Mecca a politician friend asked Dangote to stop gambling and that friend was reported to have said promise me on this holy ground you will never gamble again that's quite the ultimatum I would say Alico had also seen some of his relatives completely fritter away all their fortunes so a business associate has also said that aliko watched another uncle fall from gambling and that it put fear in him yeah so aliko vowed not to gamble and apparently hasn't done since so he's a young man in a growing economy with a big big talent for business and after learning the cement trade from his uncle aliko decided to start his own company and he was young at this point in 1978 only 21 and he asked his granddad the one who raised him for a loan to start what he called the dengote group yeah he loaned him 500 000 naira in aliko's own words 500 00 naira at the time sounds small but i think a Mercedes used to be 5,000 Naira.

So he gave me the money for 100 Mercedes.

Quite helpful to give you a sense of the scale of the loan.

Definitely.

And he didn't spend it on beamers.

He actually used it to buy cement to trade.

And he used a truck borrowed from his uncle.

Yeah, he was working seven days a week.

He said things moved very, very fast, much more than my expectation.

And in fact, instead of paying his grandfather's loan back in three years, he returned it in less than six months.

But competition was soon coming because after a few profitable years everyone was trying to get in on the cement action and the market had become flooded.

So he decides to pivot, to diversify.

He moved into trading food items like flour, salt, pasta, fish and other soft commodities.

So what do you think of this move from a kind of business sense?

It makes sense, right?

So this is like an old-fashioned industrial conglomerate, things like, you know, flour, salt, pasta, cement, fish.

These are early stage in the economic development of a country and a society.

These are the things that will do well.

These are the things that people want and they need.

Yeah.

And if you have lots of different businesses, that's smart because it means you've got a diversified portfolio.

So you spread your risk.

So it's a smart move because you're protecting yourself basically against risk in different sectors of the economy.

But funnily enough, unlike many traders at the time, you'd think that if you wanted to get rich in Nigeria around this time, the obvious thing to get into would be oil, but he didn't do that.

No, he actually felt that as an industry, it was too corrupt.

He said, if we'd followed the trend of dealing in oil, it would have tainted our name.

People would think, you've made this money because you did a lot of unethical deals in the oil industry.

And actually, it was a good strategy not to go into oil because in 1982, oil prices dropped very sharply in Nigeria thanks to a worldwide oil glut.

So he was well out of that one.

And then in 1986, his company got what he described as one of the major breaks for us.

Nigeria entered the trade liberalization policy era.

Yeah, this is essentially the government introducing incentives to boost non-oil exports.

And again, in an effort to diversify Nigeria's economy and its income away from just oil, create greater integration into the world economy, to the rest of the continent as well.

And at this point, Aleco focused his business.

He said, instead of importing everything like we used to, we concentrated on a few items, mainly sugar, rice, frozen fish, and we just kept expanding and expanding.

That meant importing sugar from Brazil, rice from Thailand.

He was selling them locally at a huge markup.

And by the early 1990s, Dangote Group was dominating the markets that they traded in.

So you could say it's right place, right time, or perhaps you make your own luck.

There's an old saying that goes, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

That's attributed to Seneca.

Well, I'm sure lots of billionaires would like to think that they prepared themselves for the exact right moment to make their fortunes.

But I do think some of it is just luck, isn't it?

I think so.

And some people do admit that.

Anyway, he's the right place at the right time, and he's making tons of money.

Difficult to know exactly how much money he's making because his company was private.

So, his business was built with seed capital from his family, expanded with profits generated from these sales.

He says at the height of importing, he was making 10,000 US dollars in profit a day, which in one year would work out to three and a half million.

In his own words, the company was creating an awful lot of cash.

He was born rich, remember that?

He probably made his own first million in the early 1990s from importing.

I think we can comfortably say that in the early 1990s, Alico is a millionaire.

He himself is in his mid-30s.

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Iliko is a millionaire thanks to importing into Nigeria, but it's unlikely he will get to a billion that way.

Yeah, so how does he get from a million to a billion?

After several visits to Brazil from where he'd been importing sugar, he'd begin to see that country change.

It became more prosperous thanks to its growth in manufacturing.

So after one trip to Brazil in 1995, he resolved to shift his company away from just importing and trading to actually processing and manufacturing stuff in Nigeria.

Right, so just making things.

But, you know, it's not like manufacturing was a low-risk kind of endeavor, right?

So he had to cope with an ailing power grid, political instability.

He was competing with cheap imports coming from Asia.

But again, perhaps luckily, history and politics were on his side because during the 1990s, the Nigerian government had begun to privatise state-owned enterprises in an attempt to improve services and take the burden off the government.

In the UK during the 1980s, there was a big wave of privatisation.

Things like British Gash, British Telecom, some of the water companies towards the end of the 80s were spun off.

And the idea was that

private capital could come in and take some of the burden, also perhaps do it more efficiently than sort of bloated government structures.

That was the idea anyway.

And the other thing is, is that if you are not responsible for things like British gas or the water companies, whatever, then when it comes to budget time when the Chancellor has to decide who to give money to, then it's going to be very hard for, let's say, a water company to compete with the NHS or education or defence.

So if you give these industries to other people to look after, it simplifies the job of government.

That's the argument, anyway.

That's the argument.

And when it comes to working in practice, sometimes, well, as we see in the UK now with some of our own failing water companies, it doesn't always work out so well.

But let's follow Alico in his acquisition spree, because in 1996, he acquires 40% of the National Salt Company of Nigeria, which was the only salt refining company in West Africa.

Like many privatised industries, he's basically inheriting a monopoly.

And then in 1997, he bought into the state-owned National Fertilizer Company of Nigeria.

And the Dangoti group manufacturing grows rapidly.

So he builds flour mills, a pasta factory, a sugar refinery.

And very quickly, this refinery was producing 90% of the national demand for sugar.

Pretty monopolistic.

Understandably, with that growing business success and wealth, he was also becoming an important figure in Nigeria.

Yes, in the mid-1990s, a US diplomatic memo reported on his movements.

They noted him as a businessman to watch.

They drew attention to his houses, not just in Karno and Lagos, but also in London and Atlanta.

And according to a State Department cable unearthed by WikiLeaks, the Nigerian government has been very supportive of Dangote.

We know the company at one time or another held exclusive import rights in sugar, cement, rice, using such advantages to do volume business and undercut competitors.

And when they say volume business, is that essentially saying that you produce so much volume of it, you can afford to sell it cheap?

So I think what that leak is sort of hinting at or saying is that he's getting favourable treatment from government, and that allows him a very competitive advantage and means that he can do business on better terms than some of his competitors and use that monopoly to his advantage.

Important, however, to say that Iliko completely denies this, but it was the election of a certain politician that was...

going to create a billion dollar break for him and create that fortune.

Yes, in 1999, he publicly donated to the winning presidential campaign of General Olosugan Obasanjo, the former military ruler and someone Alico had known for decades.

He donated 120 million naira, which was roughly 1.3 million dollars at the time.

And he talks openly about how the president helped him supercharge his business from days after the 1999 election.

Yeah, he says Obasanjo called me very early in the morning and says, can we meet today?

And the new president asked him why Nigeria couldn't produce cement instead of having to import it.

And Alico explained that it was more profitable to trade than to produce, basically, because of the lack of infrastructure in the company.

You need tons of energy to create cement, and Nigeria did not have a very stable electricity grid network or what have you.

So, those were some of the problems of doing stuff like that in Nigeria.

But he didn't suggest, you know, building a new power grid.

He suggested that if imports were restricted, production would become worthwhile to businessmen like him.

That's an interesting way of doing trade.

So, basically, if you hamper imports, you will make it more expensive.

You know, you'll make the manufacturing worth.

That's not how trade is supposed to work.

So Alico vowed to build one of the world's largest cement plants if the government restricted the flow of cement through the country's ports.

So this is clearly a very cozy relationship he's got with the government here.

He put up 319 million US dollars of his own money.

There was a bank loan of 479 million, and that was enough to build a cement factory.

And that was led by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation.

World Bank is a big international institution which specializes in financing development in countries that need it.

So, that is a lot of money.

So, both for him to invest, it's personally risky, but also a massive loan from banks.

So, they obviously trusted him to pull off the project.

The chief executive of West African Investment Bank said of Alico: Working with him as a banker is extremely challenging.

If you don't know his business at an extremely detailed level, you don't stand a chance.

He will unravel you in seconds.

He doesn't suffer fools gladly.

Interesting insight.

However, that growing dominance meant that he was facing up to public criticism, especially for buying up all those former state-owned enterprises.

Yes, he's already bought into two.

And in 2000, he made a bid to buy the Bennu cement company from the Nigerian government.

And soon after that, a group that called themselves Swem Collective put out a full-page advert in a Nigerian national paper attacking him for bidding.

Yeah, it didn't name him directly, interestingly enough, but it mentioned a wealthy and influential Kano businessman and criticised how his activities have crippling effects on sugar and salt production in the country.

And in 2007, just before the President Obasanjo administration came to an end, refineries were sold to a consortium comprising of Dangote and others in what was seen as a fire sale approach.

So basically his big buddy Albasanjo, just before he switches out the lights on his way out, sells off a bunch of other assets to his old pal Alica Dangote.

So there were public protests about this.

There were concerns the consortium were buying up all the choice assets in the country.

And at the time, All Africa News site actually drew comparisons with Russian oligarchs with connections in the Kremlin, as they put it, cornering economic wealth and assets in Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR.

Yeah, it reminded me a little bit of Russia and some of those huge things like steel, cement, oil interests, which ended up in the hands of a few very influential people.

And that happens, that is still happening to this day.

But despite all this criticism, Liko kept on making money, and he was making this big money through a route that will be familiar to listeners on this podcast: the IPO.

The initial public offering, this is when you sell shares in the company that you own to the general public, and you means that you can list on a stock exchange.

It gives you a currency because then you know kind of how much the company is worth.

And if you want to raise additional money, you can create some more shares and you can sell some more shares.

So he began partially listing some of these divisions on the stock market.

So in 2007, Dangote Sugar debuted on the Nigerian stock exchange.

They sold 30% equity and raised $420 million.

Okay, so they sold a 30% chunk of the company for 420 million.

That means that that company, if 30% is worth 420 million, then 100% is worth over a billion.

A year later, he floated his flour mills company.

It raised $148 million.

He also began to expand manufacturing outside of Nigeria into at least half a a dozen other African countries.

So you don't need to be of genius at mass to realize that with his successful trading, his profitable manufacturing, the money he's making from these IPOs, in 2008, Forbes, that's the American publication which ranks very rich people, they added Alico Dangoti to their billionaires list.

So in 2008, he's made it.

Alico is a billionaire.

At that point, Forbes says his fortune is 3.3 billion.

Now, interestingly, the Financial Times, another respected business publication based in the UK, felt this was too conservative.

They actually quoted Nigerian estimates, which suggested that with all the unlisted companies in his portfolio, Illika was actually worth at least $10 billion.

But whether it's 3.3 or 10 billion, he's on the list.

He is a billionaire.

He's made a billion from cement, from soft commodities, and this sets him apart from most of Africa's super wealthy industrialists, most of whom made their money from oil.

But once he was a billionaire, he's got to spend it.

So he finally entered the oil business and he started constructing an oil refinery outside Lagos.

Yes, he explained that from 2010, we had no debt in our companies.

So then we're thinking, what do we do with all of this cash?

The only other area that could take us was the oil industry where they can absorb that kind of money.

Because in Africa, really, where do you go and put $9 billion of investment?

If it's factories for consumable items, you won't be able to handle it.

So the one industry that can soak up his riches is the oil industry.

It's quite a fascinating kind of thought process, right?

Like, what is the most expensive industry I can park all this cash in?

Yeah, and this is ongoing as we speak, this investment, because in January of this year, a $20 billion mega refinery started to produce diesel and aviation fuel, although it has been dogged by problems over the last few months.

So when this billion-dollar mega refinery started operating, an oil and gas expert told Associated Press it will help move Nigeria from being a major importer of refined petroleum products to being self-reliant in a domestic refining capacity.

So, helping them to stand on their own feet.

That's exactly right, because at the moment they basically, although they had oil, the refined product that you put in your car or use in diesel engines or what have you, the oil is going out of Nigeria and they're having to import the refined product back in.

This is really interesting, right?

Because if you watch, I don't know, movies like There Will Be Blood, you kind of think to yourself, if you find oil in your country, you are basically getting a license to print gold.

Like, that is where the money is.

But that really isn't what happens in real life.

You certainly get rich by finding the crude oil, but a lot of the value is actually in refining that down to things like petrol, aviation fuel, plastics is a byproduct.

When you start breaking down the crude oil, there's lots of value in the little bits in it.

And actually, there's probably more value in that part of the chain than there is in the actual, you know, just shipping barrels of oil out of the back door.

So lots of value to be had in the refining area, for example, which is why bringing it into Nigeria was seen as a really important moment because you're making that economic activity, you're creating that value within the country rather than shipping the basic product out only to import the refined product back.

And presumably you're also creating jobs within Nigeria, right?

Because you need to kind of fill these positions within a mega refinery.

Exactly.

And there's more jobs in refining than there is in actual sort of oil production.

So in terms of economic value, you want to do your refining in your own country.

It really reminds me of that quote that we heard from him early on in this episode about not going to the West, making sure you stay and develop in Nigeria, in Africa.

Yeah, make stuff for yourself, keep that economic value within the country.

Now, we haven't mentioned very much about Alico's personal life because he's actually been very private about it.

But gossip sites suggest he married his first wife, Vizainab, in 1977, aged just 20, after his family arranged their marriage.

We know that ended in divorce.

He marries again, but his second marriage also ends in divorce.

He's got three grown-up daughters, two of whom currently work for the Dangote Group.

Wonder how they managed to get hired, and an adopted son.

He and his children are thought to be set to inherit their father's fortune.

And it will be a huge fortune because in 2012, Forbes named him Africa's richest person, a title he has held on to since then.

He cemented his place in history.

So now we come to the judging, and we judge him on a variety of categories.

We always start with just wealth.

So he is the richest person in Africa, the richest black billionaire in the world.

He said that one of his aspirations is to become the richest man in the world.

Doesn't really sound like him, weirdly, but anyway, there we go.

Several features, however, have described that he doesn't come across as a member of the super rich.

Alico is godfather to one of Nigeria's current biggest music stars, Davido.

He said, Uncle Aleko is a different type of billionaire.

He buys two cars every eight years.

He's very disciplined.

Every time I see him, he just says one thing and one thing only.

Save your money.

I mean, he sounds like every other uncle you've ever met in your life, which is quite sweet.

I'd quite like to have an uncle who had $13 billion.

Anyway, he scores pretty highly.

I mean, he's not at the top of the tree in terms of the hundred plus billion that some like the the Musks and the Bezoses have, but I'd give him a solid

seven.

Yeah, I would give him a solid seven.

I mean, it's quite impressive to be the richest black person in history.

And the richest person in Africa 13 years in a row.

Pretty good.

Yeah.

Oh, maybe I'll.

pretty bad.

Now you've talked me into increasing my score.

I think he should be an eight out of ten.

Okay.

It's a seven for me because sometimes we talk about how people splash their cash and whether they, if they're flamboyantly rich.

And he definitely doesn't do that.

So I'm going to keep him at a seven.

Okay.

Rags to riches is the next category.

How far has he come from humble origins?

I don't think he's going to do well on this one.

He's his

grandfather was richest man in West Africa.

He lent him the money to start his business.

He grew up steeped in business and entrepreneurialism.

Yeah.

He's got very rich, so there is a long distance he's traveled, but he started pretty rich, so I'm going to give him a two out of this one.

Yeah, I think I would give him a two.

He clearly was born with what you might call a silver spoon in his mouth.

Yeah.

So two for Rags to Riches.

Now on this one on villainy, I think there is an easy and lazy assumption when you talk about Nigeria to talk about corruption, but he doesn't seem to attract that kind of criticism.

No, he just seems to have made a lot of shrewd business decisions alongside being lucky.

Yeah, we spoke in fact with a Lagos-based BBC journalist who said while he's probably not a saint, very few very rich people are, he didn't see Alico as a corrupt bad guy.

He said he's a guy who had luck alongside some shrewd business moves and relationships.

While he works the system, he basically stays out of politics.

Although he was very good friends with President Obasanjo, which definitely helped him in his business career.

This journalist we spoke to said he's a friend to everyone but belongs to no one.

Interestingly, the Financial Times have said that his critics believe this modest manner that we've talked about masks the ruthless instincts of a monopolist ready to manipulate markets and milk political connections to force out rivals.

Yeah, and monopoly is a word that's come up a lot.

He bought state-owned monopolies.

He, if you remember, said that we could manufacture concrete here in Africa, in Nigeria, if we were to hinder imports.

So you're gaming the system a little bit bit to preserve the power of your monopoly.

So that's definitely a criticism that has been leveled at him.

I actually would like to know, you know, this may sound like a very basic question, but why are monopolies bad in business?

You know, because on one hand, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of younger people listening to this and thinking, all he's done is kind of destroy the competition.

Isn't that what you're meant to do in business?

The problem with monopolies is twofold.

Businesses can become inefficient if they don't have competition to compete against.

So they become more expensive than they should be.

They become more bloated organizations.

They're not very efficient.

And the other thing is they often snuff out innovation.

Monopolies don't tend to innovate as much as places which have competition.

They're not seen as good for an economy because it doesn't have that vibrancy.

And also, I guess, the costs are passed on to consumers, right?

Yes.

Because we're the ones who suffer if companies aren't innovative, if they hike up prices.

But if I've got no choice, you can just dial up the price to me and I've got no option, right?

As simple as that.

So in Aliko's defense, he's denied all these allegations of being a monopolist.

He says, We've been willing to put our money where our mouth is on a significant scale.

We've seen the potential in the manufacturing sector in Nigeria and the rest of Africa and have grasped it when others were unwilling to do so.

Yeah.

Another excerpt from the Financial Times: he's unapologetic about the close relations he's cultivated with successive military and civilian administrations.

He argues that anyone prepared to risk the kind of money he has in an environment where governments can prove so fickle and long-term capital so hard to find is compelled to seek influence over policy.

And there have been other accusations.

In 2020, legal action was taken against the Dangote group on behalf of people suffering from health problems that have been linked to his cement industry.

So, Le Monde, a French newspaper, interviewed a mechanic who lived near a cement factory who said, Despite the huge profit he makes from here, our neighbor's done almost nothing for us.

The water's no longer drinkable.

Two wells have been dug, but we eat dust.

So, we're still waiting for the progress the Dangote group promised.

Yeah, I mean, there are, wherever you have primary industries like this, whether it's mining, where it's cement manufacturing, it's a dirty business.

That's not to defend any of this, but I think if you went to any cement factory, whether in Mexico or Brazil, you would find similar concerns around the surrounding environment and health.

Like I say, it's not a very clean business.

And Dengotte Cement agreed, it's important to note, to pay a $270,000 compensation package for local people around there.

Doesn't sound like a great deal of money, but there we are.

There have also been accusations that he doesn't do enough for low-income people in North Nigeria and concentrate his wealth in the south.

So villainy, how do you think he scores on all of these fronts?

He's been accused of being a monopolist.

That's not good.

That's not a good economic actor, usually.

He says he put his money where his mouth is.

He basically paid a lot of money to buy up.

previously nationalized industries.

I think we took a dim view of that when it came to what happened in Russia after the fall of communism and all the oligarchs got rich.

In a way, he's a bit of an oligarch.

But on the other hand, he wanted Nigeria to be self-sufficient.

He said the West isn't going to come in and do stuff for us.

We have to do it ourselves.

And I think that deserves some credit.

So I'm going to give him a five on villainy, straight down the middle.

Yeah, I would agree with straight down the middle, to be honest.

In one sense, you can kind of see where that instinct to kind of buy up industries comes from, right?

Because it's very much the same instinct as someone who goes, I've got to do it because everyone else will just screw it up.

Yes.

Yeah.

Just on a very, very large scale.

Yeah.

So you're going to go right down the middle as well?

Yeah.

Okay.

Two fives for villainy.

Philanthropy.

So Dangote would like to be known as the biggest philanthropist in Africa, in his words.

He wants to use his voice to, quote, shape a better Nigeria and Africa as a whole.

Yeah, he started the Dangote Foundation in 1993.

It's the largest private foundation in sub-Saharan Africa with an endowment of $1.25 billion, mainly focused on reducing malnutrition and disease.

And in 2013, he joined forces with Bill Gates, one of our other billionaires.

You can listen to his episode, to pledge $43 million to fight polio via immunization.

And then by 2020, Africa was declared free of the wild polio virus.

And in 2016, again with Bill Gates, they pledged $100 million to cut malnutrition in Nigeria.

However, malnutrition is unfortunately on the rise thanks to food inflation.

Despite doing a a lot with Bill Gates, though, he hasn't signed the giving pledge.

That's where people pledge to give over half their fortune over the course of their life.

Whereas four fellow African billionaires have, including someone we'll be covering this season, Patrice Mozzepe, the South African billionaire.

So where do you think he scores in philanthropy?

I think pretty good.

1.25 billion in endowments.

Remember, his fortune's 13 billion, plus he's given 100 million and another 43.

That's well over 10% of his wealth.

That scores better than some of our billionaires.

And also, you know, there's clearly a method to his philanthropy, right?

He wants to improve health outcomes on the continent.

Yeah, I'm going to give him a seven for philanthropy.

Yeah, I think a

seven out of ten for me as well.

You know, that's a very large endowment.

Yeah.

Power.

That's one of the other categories we look at.

He's definitely had some powerful contacts throughout his business career.

So in a profile interview in the Financial Times, they said that he spent 15 minutes with President Obama.

He has video conferences of Bill Gates.

Yeah, Nigeria's former president Obasanjo, to whom he donated, said of Alico, he hasn't just accumulated capital, he's accumulated success, and success begets success.

So he's clearly a very powerful figure in Africa and in Nigeria.

And in fact, I was just watching before we came on to record this.

I watched him.

He was up on a stage with Bill Gates.

He was talking to David Rubenstein from Bloomberg.

I think he'd be quite at home in the sort of Davos man setting.

Do you know what I mean?

Putting the world to rights through their wealth and influence.

So yeah, I would give him a...

I'd give him a...

I mean, I'd give him a 7 or 8.

I don't know.

What do you think?

I think within Nigeria, probably an 8.

I would say people know who he is.

But outside of Nigeria, if you ask the average person on the street,

they probably wouldn't have ever heard of him.

Yeah.

Probably within Nigeria, I'd give him a 9.

And probably outside in world terms, I'm going to give him a 7.

I'll give him a seven out of ten.

Okay.

Legacy.

I think that that that quote that we heard from him was really powerful wasn't it?

You know nobody will come and develop this economy only us.

So in terms of self-reliance of a developing economy I think that's pretty, pretty powerful.

Clearly, Nigeria is an economic powerhouse within Africa.

It's going to be Africa's biggest oil refiner, not just producer, oil refiner by 2025.

He was fundamental to that.

And you know he's still got his sights set even higher.

This year in 2024 he announced his next venture would be in steel manufacturing to ultimately ensure all steel products used in West Africa come from Nigeria.

And he's also said, give us three or four years, Africa will not import any more fertilizer from anywhere.

I think that's a pretty powerful legacy, really.

Yeah, and it's interesting because one academic, Armel Shoplin from the University of Geneva, has said that young Africans now dream of becoming footballers or cement manufacturers.

He embodies success, replacing the figure of the intellectual with a college degree who predominated in the 1980s.

It's quite interesting when you literally make cement manufacturing a dream career.

That is power.

Do I want to be a cement manufacturer or David Beckham?

I'll go with the cement.

That's quite something.

In the history of Nigeria's economic development, I'm going to give him a nine.

Yeah, I would say actually

when it comes to writing the history books of Nigeria, he's going to play quite a big part.

Yeah, we'll give him a nine for that.

So then we have to decide whether he's good, bad, or just another billionaire.

Oh, this is an interesting one.

He's made himself very rich.

He's

definitely prone to monopolistic practices.

He's worked the phones.

Yeah, he's worked the phones.

He's had powerful political patronage at exactly the right time.

So all that counts against him.

But he has done great things for Nigeria's sense of being a master of its own economic destiny, to be more self-sufficient in important things.

I'm going to say he's good.

I don't think he's a bad billionaire.

I'm kind of torn between him just being yet another billionaire or just good because

Actually, what really tips me over into just edging it into good territory is the fact that he's consistently over the years always said it's about developing Nigeria.

It's about not relying on the West or international institutions.

It's about doing it our own way.

And that to me speaks to someone who at least has kind of principles about what he's doing right yeah i would agree okay so we both agree that iliko dangote is a good billionaire

who have we got next episode we've got the one billion dollar queen bee of dating apps co-founder of tinder creator of bumble

the youngest self-made female billionaire in US history.

But it didn't last for very long.

It's Whitney Wolf Heard, find out how she made, and then lost most of her billion-dollar fortune.

Good, Bad Billionaire is is a podcast in the BBC World Service.

It's produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward, with additional production by Tams and Curry.

James Cook is the editor.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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