How Aliko Dangote’s Production Strategy Challenges Nigerian Imports

He threw a life from morning till night and said, "This is where the market is."

Somebody needs to produce the petrol for your cars.

Somebody needs to produce the cement for your houses.

Somebody needs to produce the food that you eat.

We are importing these things from Asia, from Europe, from America.

Our strategy is to produce those things here.

I'm telling you about a conversation that took place, I think, in nineteen ninety-eight.

So I was there from the very beginning. So everything you see, from cement to the refinery, has just been one consistent strategy.

If you have two hundred million people, you have the market.

You don't need to go anywhere. Everybody is coming to Nigeria to sell to us, and one person says, "I am going to produce those goods for this market."

Now, will we ever stop driving our cars?

Will we stop entering our aircraft?

Y- this is a model that is the most sustainable business model you can think of. You have to build a house.

You have to eat. You have to drive your car.

You have to enter the plane. You have to ride your motorcycle. So when you think of it in terms of the fundamentals and the thought process gone through it, this is the best business decision you can make, and everybody who has followed that path ... You c- you'll notice his brother, who, um,

is the second richest Nigerian, is also doing the same thing, going into the same model, producing the same things, targeting the same market. It is a proven track record.

The difference is that Aliko was the one who took the first risk.

Uh, in Hausa we say that «Da na gaba ake gwada mini safarar» when you go to a river, you wait for someone to cross first. If he does not, uh, drown, you also follow. So, uh, so we're going to see many, many more people try and do this.

So from the perspective of an economist, this is precisely what Nigeria has always wanted.

How can we be a country that exports what we do not have and imports what we have?

How can you be an oil-producing country and be importing petroleum products?

How can you have the agricultural land that we have and be importing food?

How can you have the deposits of asphalt that we have and be importing cement?

And therefore, beyond business, beyond profits, we have to thank Aliko for what he's into the Nigerian economy.

As governor of the Central Bank, one of my biggest and saddest, um, problems was seeing how every day we would spend so much effort to earn foreign exchange from oil sector, exporting crude oil, and then spend the same foreign exchange importing petroleum products.

Instead of using the foreign exchange to develop agriculture, to develop infrastructure, to develop education, we would export crude oil and then turn around and import refined petroleum products and actually pay subsidy to keep refineries open in Europe,

refineries open in Asia, because we s- we bought their petroleum products at market and they had ... We were a market for them.

What Aliko has done is disrupt that model.