Last week Wednesday in Lamu county on the Kenyan coast, a Nigerian businessman stood before East African leaders to break ground on a $16 billion refinery complex that did not exist even as an idea six months ago. And he promised to be back in 40 months to commission an industrial complex that will process about 700,000 barrels of crude a day, generate 1,000 megawatts of power and produce a million tonnes of polypropylene a year, with some 60,000 people employed during construction. I was there to witness history and I took notes. But the most arresting line of the day did not come from Alhaji Aliko Dangote or the host President William Ruto of Kenya. It came from President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

Evidently a popular figure in East Africa, Museveni was hailed by every speaker, including President Ruto, as their ‘father’ and quite naturally, he spoke at the occasion where he was also warmly received by the crowd. He started with all the Marxist jargon (bourgeoisie, comprador, proletariat etc.) that many of us used to entertain ourselves back in the days on campus at Ife. He then expressed delight at seeing Dangote helping to rewrite the story of Africa beyond “this 70-year betrayal of exporting raw materials and importing finished products.” To underscore his point, Museveni did the arithmetic with coffee. A kilogramme of Ugandan beans, once husked, earns about two dollars. Roasted and packaged in another country, according to Museveni, the same kilogramme sells for forty dollars. He made the same comparative deductions with cotton and gold.

Done with the first of his four-point intervention, Museveni moved to the second. Uganda will still build its own ‘small’ refinery at Hoima and that, while he supports the Lamu project, he will not put Ugandan money in it until he has found out from President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania what became of an earlier plan for a refinery at Tanga. His third point was a renewed call for the political federation of East Africa, on the premise that while shares in a refinery sited in Kenya may bring Uganda profit, it will not answer the question of jobs for his people. The fourth and final point by Museveni, offered almost in passing, was a confession: Dangote, he disclosed, had come to Uganda before but made no investment. “I didn’t know that some people were disturbing him with bribes,” Museveni said.

Before I deal with the substantive issue, what struck me most in Lamu was the gathering itself. The Presidents of Kenya, Uganda, Benin and Togo were in attendance. So was the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Dr Abiy Ahmed. The bereaved President of Tanzania (she recently lost her husband) sent a representative and so did the Presidents of Rwanda, South Sudan, Somalia and Burundi. Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was also there with the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources (Oil), Senator Heineken Lokpobiri. I can think of regional summits that have not drawn that kind of attendance. And this was a private citizen, who holds no office and commands no army, getting leaders from West and East Africa to gather on a stretch of the Kenyan coast to watch him dig. That convening power is what private capital looks like when it has a track record. President Ruto was quite candid about this. The Lamu project, he said, is enabled by government but driven by the private sector, because no government can borrow or tax its way to every factory, port and power plant.

Now, let me come back to Museveni. If the ‘African betrayal’ is 70 years old, questions must also be asked of the man lamenting it. Museveni took power in Kampala in January 1986 (40 years ago) and most Ugandans alive today have known no other president. That ‘betrayal’ is also part of his legacy in so many ways. Commercially viable crude oil deposits were confirmed in Uganda’s Albertine Graben in 2006. By Museveni’s own account in Lamu, that oil has still not come out of the ground, and he told the audience why: “Because I refused to export petroleum without a refinery.”

As a principle, that is admirable. If you cannot process, you should not export. But a principle is not a refinery. In February 2015, Uganda selected a consortium led by Russia’s RT Global Resources to build one, and the Russians walked away the following year. In April 2018, an agreement was signed with the Albertine Graben Refinery Consortium for a plant of 60,000 barrels per day. It lapsed in June 2023 without a final investment decision. In March last year, a fresh agreement was signed with Alpha MBM Investments of the United Arab Emirates. Nothing has come out of it. Twenty years of planning. Three sets of partners. Not one barrel! Meanwhile, the refinery Dangote conceived in April this year will have nearly twelve times the capacity of the one Uganda has spent two decades trying to build!

Finally, let’s come to the fourth of Museveni’s points. The biggest industrial investor on the continent went to Uganda looking for where to put his money. Some people, presumably with the power to say yes or no, asked him for theirs first. He left. And the president did not tell us that he held anybody accountable. That, right there, is the betrayal. It was not committed by a coffee roaster in Europe or a commodity trader in Geneva. It was committed at home, under a leader who has had 40 years to find out what goes on in his own government. It says a lot that President Ruto felt the need to reassure Dangote that nobody in Kenya would be allowed to extort anything from him. No president should have to say that to an investor at a public ceremony. But everybody in the audience understood why he did.

It would be unfair to make Museveni carry the failure of a whole continent. The natural resources have always been here. So is the market. The challenge is about what we do with them. From the Lagos Plan of Action in 1980 to Agenda 2063, African leaders have never been short on declarations on industrialisation. What they have been short of is delivery. According to Afreximbank figures cited by Ruto, Africa produced about 6.8 million barrels of crude oil a day in 2024 and consumed about 4.5 million barrels a day of refined products, much of it bought back from abroad. Kenya alone spent KSh530 billion (about 4.1 billion dollars) importing petroleum products last year.

However, before Nigerians laugh at Uganda, we should remember that the lamentation of Museveni is ours too. I once recalled Obasanjo’s admission that none of the 18 refinery licences he approved while in office was ever actualised just as many have written on the billions of dollars sunk into the endless turn-around maintenance of government-owned refineries. Dangote told the audience that the Lamu project “started like a joke” in April, when President Ruto sent emissaries to him to discuss buying fertiliser. Ruto’s version is that he wrote Dangote a letter that same month, inviting him to an infrastructure summit convened in Kenya with the Africa Finance Corporation, and asked him to imagine a refining platform for East Africa. Either way, the idea is barely six months old. By 30 September, the land had been set aside, the first equipment was on site, heads of government had been assembled and a completion date had been fixed.

None of this should surprise anyone who followed the Lekki story. When Dangote decided to build a refinery in Nigeria, he recalled in Lamu, many said it was impossible. The project was too big, the financing too difficult, the engineering too complex. “Some doubted us. Some dismissed us. Some even mocked the scale of our ambition.” The Lekki refinery took far longer and cost far more than its promoter first imagined, as Dangote has often admitted. But Lekki now stands, and it is on the strength of that record that he could say in Kenya: “Lekki proved that it can be done. Lamu must prove that it can be repeated.”

Addressing African leaders directly, Dangote said his group has $50 billion to roll out under a plan that ends in 2030, across infrastructure, minerals, ports, power and petrochemicals. “All you have to do is tell us what you want and our team is ready to work with you.” African businessmen used to visit presidential villas to ask for things. In Lamu, a Nigerian businessman stood before presidents and asked what they needed. There is one more thing we should give to Dangote. What he builds is never just a plant. The Lekki complex sits on 2,635 hectares, about seven times the size of Victoria Island. Lamu is Kenya’s least populous county with about 175,705 people (the 2019 Census Baseline recorded 143,920 residents). Dangote told the people that where they were standing, “an industrial city will begin to emerge,” and promised a school to train 1,000 local engineers and technicians.

Meanwhile, shortly before the ceremony in Lamu, the Environment and Land Court in Malindi ordered the parties to maintain the status quo in a suit filed by 133 residents of Chandavai who say the site is their ancestral land. The case comes up next Wednesday (14 October). It is not a frivolous matter. Lamu Old Town is a UNESCO World Heritage site and its fishermen want to know what happens to their waters. Ruto, to his credit, told the people of Lamu that such questions are not obstacles to development but what responsible development must answer. Dangote himself said industrialisation must have a human face. Both men should be held to their words.

With the African leaders in Lamu taking turns to eulogise Dangote, it was little surprise that they would call for more entrepreneurs like him. But in the separate conversations I had with some people on our punishing journey—which was almost like military troop deployment—including auntie Fatima Wali-Abdurrahman, Mr Asue Ighodalo, Mr Stanley Jegede and Mr Robert Ade-Odiachi (uncle Robbie), I said what we need is not necessarily more Dangotes but more entrepreneurs with his can-do spirit, especially among the young generation. We need to reverse this idea of chasing bubble government appointments and redirect their minds to entrepreneurship.

Readers of this page already know where I stand on Dangote. As I wrote in May this year, Dangote and the Power Sector – THISDAYLIVE, Dangote has demonstrated the possibility of “a productive Nigerian capitalism and its extension to the rest of Africa.” Lamu is the latest in that extension. As a firm believer in local entrepreneurship as an engine for job creation and national development, the illustration I often use to defend the few big players we have in Dangote and Dr Mike Adenuga Jnr is the Biblical parable of talents that is set within the context of investment and productivity. In Lamu, Museveni brought the point home for me in a way he couldn’t have imagined. While both the first and second servants in the Biblical account made a hundred percent profit from what each was given, nobody knew about their business practices. Yet, as I once wrote, many Nigerian businesspeople have also been offered opportunities through the patronage system we run but they spend their winnings on vanities without adding any value to our society. These are billionaires who employ no more than drivers, cooks, gardeners, stewards and the likes—personal staff who merely minister to their indulgences and those of their families. From what the unproductive servant who buried his one talent in the Biblical parable tells us, which we can also see from the Museveni story in Lamu, not even a ‘monopolist’ can profit from a refinery that was never built!

In his speech at Lamu, President Ruto said that the African leaders before them secured the flag for their countries and the task of his own generation is to build the industries that will make independence real. I completely agree with him. But between those two generations stands another, which has held the flag for 40 years and is still drawing up plans. Dangote has now shown them twice, first in Lekki and now in Lamu, what it looks like when somebody ‘gets on with the job’. Kenyans, Ruto warned Dangote, “are very good in keeping data” and they will count the 40 months he promised to deliver on the refinery.

Just as well. But it is also a pity that nobody was counting the 40 years for Museveni and other African leaders for whom national development and the well-being of their people is forever ‘in the pipelines’ of unbuilt refineries!

• You can follow me on my X handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com

(This Day)

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