•Aliko Dangote
Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, has said he did not rely on inherited wealth to build his business empire, insisting that everything he owns today was built from scratch.
In an interview originally uploaded by Bloomberg on January 8, 2020, which resurfaced online today, the billionaire industrialist reflected on his family background, revealing that his late great-grandfather was regarded as the richest man in West Africa in the 1940s, while his grandfather was also among Nigeria’s wealthiest at the time.
“The family name is Dantata. That’s from my maternal side,” Dangote said.
He added that although his father was “fairly rich” through business and politics, he deliberately chose not to keep any of the wealth passed down to him.
“One thing that I’m very, very proud of is that I did not inherit any money from my father. I built everything from scratch to where I am.
“Whatever I inherited from him, which means in assets, I gave that to charity since then,” he explained.
Dangote recalled how he began his career working briefly with his uncle before moving to Lagos, where he started buying and selling cement.
“It was just a very low-key business. The issue is that when you look at cement, cement is what builds infrastructure and we have a lot of infrastructural deficits,” he said.
According to him, Nigeria alone faces a housing deficit of about 17,000 units, a challenge mirrored across Africa.
This, he noted, influenced his decision to invest heavily in cement manufacturing, which at the time was dominated by imports.
“When we started cement in Nigeria, we realised that majority of it was actually imported and that is why we went in there,” Dangote added.
Dangote founded Dangote Group, one of Africa’s largest conglomerates, with more than 15 subsidiaries across at least 10 African countries. The group operates in key sectors that drive the continent’s economy.
Its publicly listed companies include Dangote Cement Plc, Dangote Sugar Refinery Plc, and NASCON Allied Industries Plc, while other major ventures cover oil refining, fertiliser production, petrochemicals, steel, transport, logistics, and real estate.
