Aliko Dangote GCON is the richest… rather, wealthiest man in the whole continent of Africa. He is the 51st richest person in the world. And guess what? He’s proudly Nigerian!
Aliko Dangote was born on April 10, 1957. He is a Nigerian billionaire, who owns the Dangote Group. The company operates in Nigeria and other African countries, including Benin, Cameroon, Ghana, South Africa, Togo, Tanzania, and Zambia. Dangote Group owns salt factories and flour mills and is a major importer of rice, fish, pasta, cement and fertiliser. The company exports cotton, cashew nuts, cocoa, sesame seed and ginger to several countries. It also has major investments in real estate, banking, transport, textiles and oil and gas. The company has employed well over 11,000 people and is regarded as the largest industrial conglomerate in West Africa.
Dangote hails from a very prominent business family. He is the great grandnephew of Alhaji Alhassan Dantata, the richest African at the time of his death in 1955 (Maternal great grandnephew). Aliko Dangote is of Hausa ethnicity and hails from Kano state. Dangote peaked on the world’s richest list as the 23rd richest person in the world in 2014. He surpassed Saudi-Ethiopian billionaire Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi in 2013 by over $2.6 billion to become the world’s richest person of African descent and has been ahead of him since then.
Also Read: Aliko Dangote Biography
In an interview, he said he had been interested in business since he was in primary school and he would buy cartons of sweets and resell it to his colleagues. The company, Dangote Group started as a small business in 1977, it was the main supplier and distributor of groundnut, a trade he learnt from his mentor – Alhaji Sanusi Dantata, after getting a loan of N500,000 from him; after which it began expanding and gaining interests in other commodities. Dangote Cement is Africa’s largest supplier and distributor of cement; and in 2015 Dangote Cement launched new plants in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania. The company produces more than 30 million metric tons annually, and plans to double capacity by 2018.
Dangote, who just recently added telecommunication to his business investments and has started building a 14,000 kilometre of fibre optic cables once said in an interview: “Let me tell you this and I want to really emphasize it…nothing is going to help Nigeria like Nigerians bringing back their money. If you give me $5 billion today, I will invest everything here in Nigeria. Let us put our heads together and work.”