By Ehiedu E.G. Iweriebor
Dangote’s just completed and inaugurated Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Company during and after construction has been variously described as follows:
“As a rule, I don’t get worked up over oil refineries. But the one gradually taking form on 2,500 hectares of swampland outside Lagos … is so big, so audacious, and so potentially transformative that it is like Africa’s Moon Landing and its Panama Canal – a Pyramids of Giza for the Industrial age.”
“If Aliko Dangote, … can pull it off, he will go down as the continent’s John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon combined.”
David Pilling, “Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, on his ‘crazy’ $12bn project” Financial Times, July 11, 2018
“The plant will be a game changer for the Nigeran economy which is seriously gasping for breath. It will rewrite the story of our country and make every Nigerian proud…”
Shaka Momodu, “Dangote Refinery: The Audacity to Dream” THISDAY, May 8, 2020
“As a Game Changer.”
President Muhammed Buhari’s Speech
May 22, 2023
In relation to the topic of this essay, ancient and medieval Africans created different great architectural and engineering marvels but among them the Pyramids of Egypt are the most recognized structures and adjudged as the globally significant engineering masterpiece of them all in terms of their complexity, dimension, size and height etc.
Dangote’s Refinery’s Crude Distillation Column (CDC) equipment is nearly as tall as the Giza Pyramid of ancient Egypt. Like that Pyramid, Dangote’s Pyramid of Industrial Production SPIRALS and SOARS high skywards to distill and produce high quality products for Nigerian, African and world markets. Hence the title of this essay “Pyramid” is prefaced with “Industrial Production” to speak to the different Age and intention of these monumental projects. This is a project of the modern Industrial Age in which large factories are built for mass production of goods for large-scale or mass societies. In the same way, Dangote’s African Pyramid of Industrial Production is geared to creating an Africa with the capacities for mass production, mass prosperity, mass power and mass pride and the restoration of African Dignity.
BACKGROUND The Ancient African Technological Advancement and Cultural Power
The Dangote refinery, fertilizer, and Petrochemical Complex represents a contemporary example of ancient and medieval monuments and structures which Ancient Africans created and built in Egypt Kush and Axum. These were the ancient architectural and engineering master pieces and wonderful projects like pyramids, obelisks, tombs, palaces, exquisite art works; etc. In medieval times, Africans created similar major cultural art works of Kongo, Makonde, Ile Ife, Benin etc, and architectural and engineering monumental complexes like the Zimbabwe project, the walled city of Birnin Zaria, Birnin Kano, Birnin Ngazaragamu, and Benin moats and walls and the Ijebu walls, Mali irrigation projects etc.
These developments indicate African mastery of technological capacity, scientific knowledge and construction capabilities with which to build these monuments, irrigation and other military, economic, and cultural projects. All these projects attest to the technological capacities of the ancient and medieval Africans with the confidence to conceive and undertake these monumental architectural, economic and engineering projects.
In general, the ability to conceive and undertake such these monumental projects implies the existence of leaderships and elites with powerful ambitions and vast visions for greatness and the creation of sophisticated societies and advanced states to undertake these enduring and global significant projects reflecting the outlook of ancient Africans’ self-conception as powerful and technologically equipped societies.
At the same time, to undertake these vast and monumental projects entails the existence of: State Power; State Organizational and Mobilizational capacities; Educational system for the production of highly educated experts as well as vast skilled human resources; Scientific Power; Technology Power and other enabling capacities and resources. These resources and vast state ambitions signify aspirations to global power, and societal power and dignity. These are the capabilities and resources which ancient and medieval Africans, leaders and state created to achieve their ambitious objectives.
Thus, it is clear that ancient and medieval African societies and peoples had the autonomous capacity for self-propulsion and self-development.
This is the heritage of state power, leadership ambitions, state organizational capacity and technological capacitation for self-propulsion and self-development which ancient and medieval Africans states, societies and leaderships bequeathed to succeeding generations of Africa states and leaderships from the 15th century.
2
The Eras of African Disempowerment: Enslavement, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism and the Implantation of the Colonial Software of Servility and Disempowerment.
While medieval African societies retained their power of self-propulsion and the economic development and self-sufficiency for the management of their societies through to the 18th-19th centuries, certain developments internally; and in the global system began to intervene and weaken African autonomous power. The decline of Africa power of self-development and the process of African disempowerment began gradually from the period of slavery/enslavement; but most effectively from the upsurge of European imperialism and colonialism: political occupation, cultural domination and economic exploitation of Africa and partially to the present period of neo-colonialism.
The colonial period was a major era of African history that disrupted African evolution from a period of a continent of autonomous technological power, self-propulsion, self- production, prosperity, and self-confidence to determine their societal choices of development pathways and projects, to an era of progressively weakened and disorientated state. This state was brought about during the period of direct colonial intervention including political conquest and domination as well as colonial programmes and process of intensive cultural warfare: psychological and mental colonization. These were in addition of new economic patterns and institutions for raw material demand and production systems and equipment of exploitation: extraction and exportation, all of which disrupted Africa’s evolution technologically and that affected African confidence in their ability to self-develop. This was the powerful impact of implantation of colonial software of servility which still affects African leaderships and the elite to the present day.
In sum, the enslavement period, imposed indignity on Africans; colonialism imposed political domination, psychological disarray and the software of servility on Africans and neo-colonialism maintained the conditions of mental colonization, economic under production and exportation of value and importation of poverty.
3
The Eras of Re-empowerment and the Liberatory Pathways: Nationalism, Independence, Freedom, Renewal of Africa Agency and the Implantation of the Software of Power.
Despite the imposition of colonial domination and the disempowerment agenda, the colonial agenda was never total and could not reach the entire colonies and convert all the elite with the software of servility. There were significant elements of the African freedom fighters, anti-colonial activists, intelligentsia and elites who retained their cultural and mental autonomy and their “native” psycho-cultural foundations and the free will that spurred their desire to struggle for rights, freedom and independence. These were the African elites and intelligentsia who were patriotic and nationalistic and were concerned with the revival of African self-development capacity for the modern era through technological capacitation, mass industrial production, and in-continent prosperity generation.
With the recovery independence the nationalist leaderships and elites faced complex challenges including the colonial legacy of the neo-colonial system of impediments and disempowerment. Therefore, the patriotic leaderships and nationalist elite began to struggle for new alternative strategies for African political, cultural and economic re-empowerment. These were African patriotic nationalists that were concerned with revival of African self-development capacity for the through technological capacity, mass industrialization, modern agricultural production and the promotion of in-continent and in-country prosperity generation in the modern era.
4
Dangote and the Nationalist Economic Revolutionaries
Dangote was among these African and Nigerian nationalist economic revolutionaries who saw and chose the nationalist economic pathway to economic transformation against the extant neo-colonial system of production of raw material for exportation and importation of manufactured goods as the dominant of comprador bourgeoise economic vocation of the neo-colonial system. According to Dangote, it was in 1978 when he was 21 years old and Nigeria was 18 years old that he came across to the Nigerian government promotional economic ideological ideas of “backward integration ” as a path to national economic development through import substitution industrialization to mass production, mass employment and mass prosperity generation that he eventually came to the conclusion that was the path to take to Nigerian/African transformation and development. He took this doctrine to heart.
Dangote’s distinctiveness is partly derived from his multiple commercial and social heritages. These include his family business background, Kano as an ancient centre of production and commercial activities; trade within Hausa land; and regional and long-distance trade in ancient West Africa and Kano as an entrepot of the Trans Sahara Trade to and from North African centres as Fez, Marrakesh, Tunis, Sijilmasa etc.
All these heritages were mixed in the melting-pot of ancient Nigerian DNA that today defines contemporary Nigerian-ness or the Nigerianity. This Nigeria DNA is pan-Nigerian, transethnic and found in the societies and peoples who resided in the ancient Nigerian commonwealth: empires, Kingdoms, states, city-states, Chiefdoms, and decentralized societies.
This pan-Nigerian DNA Nigerian, what Professor Ehiedu Iweriebor conceptualizes as Nigerians creative genetic code – a composite psycho-cultural admixture derived from comprised of the following settled traits: hard work, confidence, self-assurance, organizational acumen, vast ambition, audaciousness, achievement orientation, mobilization, sartorial flamboyance, free speech and militant vocal expression and monumental visions. These elements minimally constitute the genetic markers of classical and typical Nigerian behavior in various areas of human endeavours that Nigerians engage in: the expectation to be the brightest, the biggest and the most successful. These psycho-social and cultural genetic markers were forged in the anvils and forges of the various ancient Nigerian societies: empires, kingdoms, city states, chiefdoms and decentralized societies interacting in the same environment of beneficial political and economic relations, social conflicts and warfare, diplomatic interactions and recovery in same geo-economic commonwealth for millennia. They are expressed in contemporary Nigeria as constituents what Professor Iweriebor describes as the Nigerian Alloy, the universally recognized and globally acknowledged traits of Nigerian-ness.
Dangote is a classic example of the embodiment of this Nigerian DNA in the contemporary era. This is the pan-Nigerian social foundation, fecund soil and affirmative psycho-cultural environment that Dangote was born in, brought-up and excelled with passion and confidence that is captured and expressed by his mantra “Nothing is Impossible”. An apt summary of the Nigerian DNA.
Dangote and the Doctrine of African Economic Transformation, Re-empowerment and In-Continent Prosperity Generation
This is the basis of Dangote’s practical move from his import and export trading business model/comprador vocation to eventual manufacturing industry/national bourgeoise transformational role. He thereby moved ideologically to the understanding of manufacturing as a more secure source of vast profits through the strategy of “Backward Integration” and import industrialization programme with its national versatile and transformational economic consequences. This Dangote economic model was conceptualized by this writer in his book, Dangote and Pan-African Transformation: The Revolutionary Impact (2018), as the Dangotean African Transformation Template Strategy (DATTS).
This was the ideological and doctrinal basis for the Dangote’s Industries Limited (DIL) policy of mass production, self-reliance and self-sufficiency of these manufactured products such as cement, sugar, rice, tomato and etc and currently applied to areas of refined petroleum products, petrochemicals and fertilizer products.
This led to the global Dangote Pan-African Strategy of development characterized by these necessary and permanent features:
MASS PRODUCTION
MASS PROSPERITY
MASS POWER
MASS RACIAL PRIDE
5
Mass Production and Self-Sufficiency
In economic terms Modern Africa is characterized by a lack of the capacity for mass industrial production of goods and services. Consequently, the economies suffer for endemic insufficiency and the corresponding condition of scarcity, poverty and want.
Dangote development strategy has been geared toward industrial mass production for self-reliance and self-sufficiency. As he began to encounter developing economies like Brazil with vast Industrial production systems, he came to the understand that the path to secure profitability in developing countries like Nigeria was the creation of monumental factories that would mass produce range of goods for self-reliance and self-sufficiency. His framework of thought, as already noted, was applied to all his manufacturing industries.
This Dangote doctrine of mass production and national and continental self-sufficiency is epitomized by the Dangote Complex, including the Petroleum Refinery, Petrochemical, and Fertilizer plants. The capacities of these plants capture the drive to mass production and self-sufficiency.
The petroleum refinery has the capacity to process 650,000 barrels daily producing the following: Gasoline 53 million liters daily; diesel 34 million liters daily; kerosene 10 million liters daily; Jet Fuel 2 liters million daily. All of these will produce surplus for export.
The Petrochemical plant has the capacity for the production 900,000 tonnes of polypropylene annually. This will eliminate dependency imported on raw materials for the plastics industry. An important element is that the plant will produce 77 types of polypropylene for different uses thereby expanding the scope of industries that can be established to utilize this great intermediate goods industry.
The fertilizer plant is ammonia and urea plant. It has a production capacity of 3 million metric tons of Urea per annum. It is one the largest fertilizer plant in the world. The plant will meet 1.5 million metric tonnes of national demand with other 1.5 available for export.
Thus, the products of Dangote complex will meet Nigeria’s needs of these products, thereby achieving national self-sufficiency. The extra capacities of plants will meet the needs of West and Central Africa and the other parts of the world.
This outcome fulfills one of the original mantras of the Dangote Group’s ideals of their global African objectives, “A SELF-SUFFICIENT AFRICA”. This idea of “A Self-Sufficient Africa” is one of the most potent nationalist Dangote formulations that tallies with the inner-most spiritual desires and material wishes of Africans to be free from the humiliations of dependency, want and lack that has endured from colonialism to the present; and to RE-ENTER the realms abundance, freedom and pride. Thus “A Self-Sufficient Africa” captures the eternal African desires for the restoration of human dignity.
The Dangote choice of mass production and self-sufficiency has become a beacon
for Nigerian industrialists to think and to construct their factories and enterprises to achieve mass production and self-sufficiency for the Nigerian, African and world markets.
6
Mass Prosperity through Mass Industrialization
The significance of these Dangote plants goes beyond mass production for self-sufficiency to the production of intermediate goods that can become the bases of the creation of hundreds of industries and in fact for the activation of national and continental mass industrialization.
Thus, apart from their basic products, these plants produce intermediate goods that are essential for major modern industries that have to be imported in the absence of domestic sources. For example, the petroleum refinery apart from its petroleum, diesel, jet fuel, kerosene, the refinery produces many by-products including Slurry for the manufacture of Carbon Black. Carbon Black is used in making tires and many other rubber products examples belts, hosses, gaskets, bushing, wiper blades, conveyor belts and others. It is also used in plastics and electronic products and making toner and printing ink. It is clear therefore that from just Carbon Black as an intermediate good a range new modern industries can be actuated to broaden the Nigeria manufacturing industries. Today with the expansion computers and printer usage in Africa and Nigeria, toners and printing ink are in high demand and are largely imported. Therefore, Carbon Black can be deliberately incentivized to develop a large toner and printing ink industries in Nigeria for the Nigerian and vast African markets.
Thus the various petroleum intermediate products will promote mass industrialization with mass employment, good incomes, and general mass prosperity.
Petrochemicals are derived for petroleum and natural gas. The major groups are Olefins, Aromatics and Synthetic Gas. The primary products of the Dangote Petrochemical plant are within the Olefin subgroup with specifically polypropylene and polyethylene, collectively known as polymers. But for now, it is producing polypropylene. These can provide the intermediate goods/feedstock requirement of the entire Nigerian plastic industries. Thus, with these domestic sources the Nigeria industry will no longer be dependent on the importation of feedstocks. Ethylene is used to make garbage bags, camera films, milk crates, bags and others. Thus, these ancillary industries will lead to the creation and expansion of new industries in the cottage, small, medium and large-scale industries in these various sub-sectors of the plastic and other industries. This again will result in mass industrialization based on of on domestic raw materials and intermediate good with the concomitant promotion of mass employment, steady incomes, improved quality of life, in-country and in-continent mass prosperity generation.
The other major component of the chemical complex is the fertilizer plant that produces ammonia and urea for agricultural production. This is another example of a production systems to meet the needs for modern agriculture that relied for many decades on imported fertilizer that could have been produced from domestic resources. It is another Dangote’s example intentional Choice to create the basis of national autonomy and self-sufficiency in the agricultural sector.
Urea can used as feedstock for the development of many modern industries. For example Urea is used in the making of paint, adhesives, polyurethanes, pharmaceutical such as toothpaste, cosmetics, flame proofing, acid, fabric softeners, cattle feeds, formaldehyde, an additive to paper board, and plywood; for surface coating, moulding resins, leather clothing, textile and for products that reduce noxious emissions from diesel engines.
In short, the intermediate goods from various Dangote chemical complex: refinery, petrochemicals and fertilizer will provide the seeds for conscious and deliberate programmes of Nigerian and African mass industrialization to generate mass prosperity through the availability of mass domestic sources of production, mass employment and advanced living conditions.
Dangote by the creation of mass industrialization and conditions of in-country and in-continent prosperity generation has shattered the myth of Africa as endemically poverty- ridden; and replaced it with a reality of continent of prosperity generation from the exploitation of internal resources. This is in effect the creation of a new narrative of ideological freedom, production of capacities, practical autonomous national efforts and the triumph of African Will to Victory in an environment suffused by the externally fabricated dogmas of African incapacity.
7
Power and African Re-empowerment
The Dangote chemical complex, the refinery, petrochemical, and fertilizer plants are symbols and examples of African monumental projects of re-empowerment and recovery of the power and initiative to participate in the world system from strength and power.
This is a new African condition of empowerment created by Dangote is best understands in the context of African and European from enslavement 500 years ago, but especially the conditions of colonialism in the late 19th century to the 20th century. The establishment of colonial power over African development provided the context for colonizers to develop and implant a software of servility and disempowerment.
This programme was implemented through the schools, churches, media, literature and other cultural media contributed to the creation conditions of psychological and mental enslavement, cultural diminution, political oppression, scientific and technological disempowerment.
This successful colonial psychological programming of the colonized and neo-colonial elite: intelligentsia, political, bureaucratic, technocratic and economic leaders of African countries that accounts for the persistence of the mental dependency and the choice of non-development strategies that is perversive in Africa today. In consciously and unconsciously accepting and applying the economic dogmas of the Western Multilateral Imperialist Agencies like World Bank and IMF, these African leaderships are carriers of the software of servility and the pathologies of African disempowerment.
Therefore, the recovery of Africa power and the new regime of re-empowerment requires a full understanding of the causes and conditions of disempowerment to be able create powerful functional solutions, pathways and programmes of re-empowerment. The basic elements of power include the consciousness and the necessity of re-empowerment and their political, cultural, mental, pyschological, social and economic dimensions of power. The knowledge of these elements will enable the design a large-scale African-wide re-education programmes. These elements must individually teased out and combined into a monumental secular Sacred Liberatory Text of African Re-empowerment.
In the context of this essay the most important component is societal self-owned economic accomplishment which grounds and anchors to all the other power elements and gives the society and its members with the freedom and power to act independently in their interactions with the rest of the outside world and gives them a liberated economic, ideological, cultural and mental self-perception.
Therefore, Dangote’s deliberate choice of the creation of massive and monumental industrial manufacturing systems based on the strategy of effective “Backward Integration” are exemplars of Nigerian and African radical break from foreign enslavement; and re-empowerment and implantation of the software of African liberation and self-propulsion. The Dangotean African Transformation and Template Strategy (DATTS) is the path to African mass production, mass prosperity and power. Thus, African states, nationalist and patriotic industrialists, business people and entrepreneurs must be consciously encouraged and officially incentivized to take paths of relentless investments in re-empowerment projects toward Africa’s ultimate power and the implantation of software of liberation as the norm of normal existence in Africa.
This perspective coincidences with one of Dangote’s corporate objectives and ideological desires of African empowerment emblazoned in the website as follows: “EMPOWERED AFRICA”. This is therefore also an aspirational outcome that all Africans states, businesses and people should work to accomplish.
8
Pride and the Restoration of Racial Dignity
Dangote’s investment in mass production facilities for self-reliance and self-sufficiency, mass prosperity and power and re-empowerment through monumental industrial projects are also symbols of African pride and the beginning of restoration of African Dignity in their own right. This is outside the unofficial and official African efforts at the revival African cultural power and resilience through the cultural displays and wares in Cultural Festivals as parts of the efforts to restore African dignity during colonial period and the during post-independence era.
These efforts of cultural reclamation and assertion of African dignity were powerful and necessary global efforts and were spectacular cultural displays geared to re-animate and inspire, inform and psychologically re-educate African people about their heritage that were previously denounced under colonialism. But these efforts by themselves were ultimately inadequate and incomplete. This is because these cultural efforts were not backed with contemporary autonomous African scientific, technological capacitation, industrial production capacity and economic power and grand modern accomplishments.
The background to these pan-African efforts at the cultural restoration of pride and dignity stems from the same conditions of centuries of enslavement and the decisive decades of colonialist psychological warfare on African pride and dignity. The African nationalist intelligenstia and political activists in the Diaspora from the early 20th century and later continental nationalists intelligenstia were also as parts of the political efforts toward African liberation and the restoration of African pride and dignity. The diasporan pan-African activists led by intellectuals like Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, WEB Dubois, George Padmore organized and/or participated in Pan-African Conferences between 1900-1945. These were followed by continental activists like Kwame Nkrumah, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere etc from the 1950s through to the present.
In the post-independence era, the creation of the Organization of African Unity, (OAU) gave a fillip to the efforts at cultural reclamation, restoration of African pride and dignity. This was the context of African Cultural Festivals in 1966 in Dakar; in Algiers in 1969 and the FESTAC in Lagos in 1977. There has been no state sponsored Cultural Fiesta since then. Nevertheless, several different African, continental and diasporan groups have continued to promote and celebrate African cultural heritage and historical achievements.
The efforts to advance African cultural awareness and pride among the present post- independence and millennium generations has received a major boost from the emergence of Africa video movies embodied and epitomized by the Nigerian Nollywood industry and its variants from the late 20th century to the present. Its autonomous emergence has also encouraged the similar movie industries in other African countries. The Nigerian Nollywood industry is unique for various factors: its prolificity, its content, confident presentation, its thematic growth, and its gradual evolution in quality over time. It is example of Nigeria’s confident and boundless universal creativity in the modern era. It also the second largest movies industry in the world after Bollywood of India.
Nollywood is the first modern Nigerian product conceived in Nigeria, manufactured in Nigeria, packaged in Nigeria and sold to the world from Nigeria. It is an exemplar of Nigeria’s global soft-power and its ultimate pervasive cultural Ambassador that implants Nigerian cultural signature the world over.
This trend of the young Africans unapologetically taking ownership of their cultural heritage and proudly promoting these varied cultural heritages has blossomed and is also expressed in the performing arts such as: music, dance and comedy and art works. Recently the activities of Nigerian and African cultural performers such as musicians, actors, dancers and so on has been led to the explosion of African of musical genius on the global level and the arousal of Africa pride about their cultural heritage from the past to the present that has been created in Africa and by Africans, presented and sold to world without the meddlesome “know-it-all” foreign mediators.
These African cultural performers, carriers and Ambassadors of African artistic genius of the 21st century include Burna Boy, Davido, Wiz Kid, Rema, Kizz Daniels, Tiwa Savage, Yemi Alade, Tems, Fireboy DML, Mavokali, (Commando) Master KG (Jerusalema) and from African countries etc. Unburdened by the colonial mentality of their forebears and fathers’ generations, these 21st century young generation African performance activists are cultural synthesists per excellence proudly combining elements of their particular ethnic heritages and with their contemporary composite national heritages to create unique global block-buster music, songs, movies, dances, and performances confidently presented to themselves and to the world.
It is in these ways that Africa’s unique creations and presentation in movies, music, dance, art works and other cultural performances efforts have undoubtedly contributed to the partial restoration of African dignity and pride and psychological confidence on the global level.
But it also clear that without an autonomous African global economic achievement, that racial pride and the restoration of racial dignity would be incomplete.
It is in this regard that the Dangote’s monumental world class industries are undeniable evidence of African global economic achievements in terms of mass production and promotion of self-sufficiency; in-continent prosperity generation; global power and re-empowerment, all of which contribute to racial pride and restoration of human dignity, earned by and created by African self-effort.
Some Conclusions
The Dangote choice to create a new system of economic of transformation which went against the inherited colonial economic system of neo-colonialism that promoted the expansion of exportation of raw materials and national wealth; and the importation of manufactured goods and poverty after independence, was revolutionary. This neo-colonial system leads to the re-creation of cycle of poverty generation and disempowerment. The Dangote (DATTS) system changed all of that and puts Nigeria and Africa onto the trajectory of liberation, empowerment, developmental self-propulsion and abundance.
In this regard, the Dangotean system is a perfect example of a revolutionary Paradigm Shift in social science and reality that goes beyond the inherited system of economics of neo-colonialism and inaugurated a new economic system of production, prosperity and power. An important aspect of the Dangotean African Transformation Template and Strategy (DATTS) is its practical demonstration of “backward integration” as a viable pathway to massive and secure profit-making and the simultaneous promotion of endogenous resources, non-dependent transformation with its own internal business transactions and supply-chain system and therefore in-country prosperity generation.
The other remarkable feature of this Dangotean transformation system and this particular chemical complex is its design (intentionality) and determination to generate national mass production and prosperity. It is a classic example patriotic and Nigerian national bourgeoisie indigenous investment project that is clearly geared toward the promotion of national development.
This is in total contrast from the much worshipped “Foreign Investors and Foreign Direct Investment” that have never ever invested in transformational economic sectors. In contrast, “Foreign Investors” invest in sectors of assured profit without any iota of contribution to national economic development. Examples include CFAO, SCOA, UAC, RT Brisco, Shell, Total, Agip, Lafarge, Indian companies like Chellarams and Chanrai; Leventis, Suzuki etc. These enterprises despite decades of presence in Nigeria have made no value-added production facilities in Nigeria. Instead, they have maintained primary focus in profitable exploitative extractive and commercial activities that add no value to country. In spite of this disreputable tradition of FDI non-investment in productive sectors or value-added activities, the Nigerian officialdom: political leaders, bureaucrats, technocrats, business leaders and companies, the intelligentsia in the media and academia are worshipful of so-called “foreign investors” and all parrot the dogma of “FDI” as the pathway to development.
The Dangote chemical complex is also unique phenomenon and remarkable event in Nigeria’s economic history. It is the first industrial city and economic city of Nigeria. Apart from the chemical complex, the area has a host of complementary industries which are full-scale factories such as a large-scale oxygen and acetylene plant for the production of welding gases. etc. In addition, there are ancillary facilities like workers housing, low density residential areas, mixed use sites, roads, schools, banks, industrial sites, logistic and ware housing, power plants, sewage systems etc of all which suggest that a new human settlement is been developed, an Economic City. All these industries and facilities underscores the patriotic commitment and nationalist zeal that animates Dangote’s desire to make Nigeria into one of the greatest industrial centres of Africa and the world.
These Dangote monumental industrial projects also have remarkable educational impact. The conception and construction of these plants required the mobilization of massive numbers of experts, professionals, and skilled workers, a total of 30,000 Nigerians. Apart from large numbers of workers used in building of the uncompleted Ajaokuta Steel Plant, this the largest concentration of new Nigerian varied engineers, technologists, technicians, crafts people, heavy equipment operators, and various builders all trained in the Dangote schools of national self-equipment for transformation.
These Dangote monumental industrial production systems are an African wonder of the contemporary Age. They are also liberatory seed projects and the drivers of required mass industrialization of the convoluted emergent African century.
This new Dangotean system is unique in its scope and intention, compared to the ancient projects. On the hand, without question the memorable African ancient and medieval structures: pyramids, monuments, exquisite artworks, architectural works and engineering masterpieces are eternal evidence of African leadership visions and ambitious for greatness, grandeur, organization abilities and state power. But their static location in particular countries and regions meant that their impact was limited and indirect. They were known in other parts of Africa by information and spread of knowledge about these African cultural creations.
In contrast, the vision of Dangote’s African Pyramids of Industrial Production system is deliberately Pan-African, dynamic, versatile, and in its reach is extensive and continent-wide. It is also inherently generative in its capacity for expanded production and the creation self-sufficiency; products availability throughout Africa; mass prosperity generation through mass industrialization; creation of continental economic power; and freedom from dependency on imported goods as well as freedom from the imperative of submission to foreign diktats from bilateral and multilateral imperialist agencies. It is also a contribution to the racial pride and restoration of African Dignity through a globally economic significant project.
These are the eternal impacts on Africa of the Dangote’s African Pyramids of Industrial Production that makes the Dangotean African Transformation Template and Strategy (DATTS), a unique home-grown ideology and praxis with a universally applicable template with nationally appropriate pathways for Africa’s final arrival to autonomous power, entry to into world system as equals and equipped with the domestic industrial capacitation and mechanisms for self-propulsion.
In summary, Dangote is the Nigerian inheritor and embodiment of the African ancient and medieval ideological visions of power and vast ambitions of greatness; with the audacity to conceive such monumental industrial projects in the modern era; to undertake its gigantic construction; the ability to organize the massive financial requirements; the mass mobilization of the large-scale expert and skilled human resources; the discipline and resilience to see the such a massive project to conclusion/completion; unfazed by domestic and external naysayers; to acquire and co-ordinate technological equipment from different sources to create a seamless Nigerian engineering marvel and masterpiece and an African wonder of the modern era.
Professor Ehiedu E.G. Iweriebor, Ph.D, is the Chief Executive, Free Africa Research Associates, (FARA).
Lagos and New York.
Formerly
Department of Africana, Pueto Rican, Latino Studies,
Hunter College,
CUNY, New York, NY 10065
