He is the continent’s wealthiest tycoon , worth give or take $30bn. And on September 14th he launched Africa’s biggest ever initial public offering (IPO) for Dangote Petroleum Refinery, to give the mega-project its official name, hoping to raise $1.6bn at a valuation of nearly $50bn. ALIKO DANGOTE is the big man of African business. He has built its largest oil-refining complex, roughly half the size of Manhattan, on the outskirts of Lagos. If it reaches this market capitalisation when its shares begin trading on the Nigerian Exchange in November, it could instantly become one of Africa’s most valuable listed firms.
MTN Nigeria, the country’s biggest mobile-phone network, swung from a loss in 2024 to a record post-tax profit of over $700m in 2025.
FTSE Russell, a global compiler of indices which in 2023 changed Nigeria’s status from a risky “frontier market” to a virtually uninvestable “unclassified” one, is reversing this decision. In Malawi, where some banks’ earnings were as much as doubling, year on year, financial advisers took to TikTok in Chichewa (the local language) explaining how to become a “part owner” of your favourite lender. Their current upswing “is going to last a few years”, reckons David Cowan of Citigroup, an American bank.
African companies have benefited from wiser economic policies in their domestic markets. Ghana has brought down inflation and removed lingering uncertainty about their currencies. So has Nigeria, which has also forced banks and pension-fund managers to hold more capital. Zambia is restructuring its public debt, and is a winner from the global boom for copper, of which it has deep reserves. Many locally listed companies are consumer-facing brands familiar to non-professional investors. Mr Dangote’s cement business made nearly as much. The real liquidity will come from deep-pocketed institutional investors, perhaps including foreign ones. By listing his refinery in Nigeria rather than abroad, as many of the biggest African firms in sectors like mining and energy tend to, Mr Dangote may also attract more domestic smart money (he is thinking of a secondary listing in America but only a few years from now). Africa’s perky economies are already doing this. After that, who knows. But in the meantime, expect a stadium-like atmosphere on African bourses.
