Indications emerged on Wednesday that
the $8bn refinery proposed by Africa’s richest man and President,
Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, would be located at the Olokola
Free Trade Zone, Ondo State.
A senior official of the company, who
asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak on the
matter, told our correspondent that the refinery would be located in the
OFTZ.
One of the factors considered for the
location of the refinery, according to the source, is that it is the
biggest deep seaport in the country and other big industries are located
there; besides, Ondo is one of the oil producing states in the country.
The source added that stable crude oil
supply was also a vital element in the choice of the location for the
refinery because Chevron and a number of other oil producers had oil
fields in the oil-rich region of the state.
On why Lagos was not chosen, industry
analysts said though the state was a coastal state, Dangote would have
to build pipelines to transfer crude from oil fields to the refinery,
thereby incurring additional expenses.
The source explained that necessary
approvals had been secured for the refinery, adding that the Dangote
Group was just waiting for the necessary equipment with which to build
the refinery to arrive.
Another source told our correspondent
that Dangote, who was listed on Monday as the first African entrepreneur
to lay claim to a $20bn fortune and one of the 25 richest men in the
world, would put down $4bn of his personal fortune to build the
refinery, while international financial institutions had raised the
balance.
Dangote had in April announced plans to
invest up to $8bn in building an oil refinery with capacity for around
400,000 barrels a day by late 2016.
The capacity, experts had said, would almost double Nigeria’s current refining strength.
This will really help not only Nigeria
but sub-Saharan Africa. There has not been a new refinery for a long
time in sub-Saharan Africa,” Dangote had told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Nigeria currently has the capacity to
produce some 445,000 barrels per day in four refineries, which operate
well below that owing to decades of mismanagement and corruption in
Africa’s leading energy producer.
The country relies on subsidised imports for 80 per cent of its fuel needs.
Dangote said the country’s ability to import fuel would soon be challenged.
“In five years, when our population is
over 200 million, we won’t have the infrastructure to receive the amount
of fuel we use. It has to be done,” he said.
Past efforts to build refineries have
often been delayed or cancelled, but analysts have said Dangote should
be able to build a profitable Nigerian refinery, owing to his past
successes in industry and his strong government connections.
Analysts have said previous attempts to
get the refineries going were held back by vested interests such as fuel
importers profiting from the status quo.
“The people who were supposed to invest
in refineries, who understand the market, are benefiting from there
being no refineries because of the fuel import business. Some are going
to try to interfere,” Dangote said.
He said making a new refinery run at a
profit would work even if the government failed to scrap the subsidised
fuel price that has deterred others from investing.
“We’ve done our numbers and the numbers are okay,” he said.
Dangote, who spoke on the sidelines of
the recent World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, South Africa,
said he had secured $4.25bn loans from banks to build the refinery.
He said the loan was secured from “two offshore banks and some Nigerian banks.”
Apparently Samuel L. Jackson needs to say "motherf--ker" as much as audiences want him to. In a speech at last night's American Institute for Stuttering gala,
Jackson revealed that the swear word wards off a stutter he has been
battling since his childhood in Tennessee. Audiences may have thought
that Jackson simply had an unusual affinity for using the word, but
apparently "motherf--ker" saved his life. 
