By Adonis Byemelwa
Your eyes are a few years old, data dated to as recently as last October, and the global storyline about Aliko Dangote for most days of his career has been the mountain of steel and concrete that is his $20 billion refinery in Lekki. But now, in a strategy recently teased out during a conversation with IFC Managing Director Makhtar Diop, Dangote is going to be pushing water- as infrastructure.
Around 400 “mini-dams” exist in Nigeria, built to underpin the rural economy of Africa’s most populous nation. Most of them lie idle these days, choked with silt or crippled by malfunction. These are no longer just abandoned government projects to Dangote; they are the solution to lifting millions out of poverty.
Agriculture, Dangote said, “is no longer the business of poor men. “That is what could truly pull our people up out of poverty. We do agriculture to create jobs and change lives. The sector, as envisioned by Dangote, is industrial scale. He feels that by rehabilitating these 400 dams with the help of the IFC and World Bank Group, Nigeria will be able to create a year-round agriculture cycle, which so far isn’t possible for the average farmer.
The logic is simple: irrigation. Without it, African farming is a lottery ticket to the sky. It turns it into an industry that is predictable, bankable. “Now they will go, once the dams are working, they will farm. There is water. They can do irrigation… people can actually earn a living all year round,” Dangote said. It is this consistency that makes a subsistence farmer into a commercial supplier.
This is because, though Dangote seeks profit, he also “desires self-satisfaction” through jobs. With the appropriate infrastructure, he estimates that a fully developed farming plan could create 200,000 direct employment opportunities. It would not only inject enormous amounts into the Nigerian GDP; it would also tackle the drivers of regional instability by designing economic inclusion around youthful jobs.
This is where the partnership with the IFC comes into play. The World Bank Group provide the required structural framework to scale these solutions while Dangote brings the industrial willpower and local knowledge. We’re looking at dredging the dams, maintaining mechanical equipment and building the logistics chains to get produce from farm gate to global market.
The industrialist is closing the loop on food security, focusing like a laser beam on water and fertiliser (another area where Dangote has invested heavily).
He contends that prosperity is not what you dig out of the ground, whether it be oil, but rather what you can grow on it. It was when the conversation focused on Diop that one realised for Dangote, the “African Renaissance” starts in the soil. The water, and surely, jobs and the dignity that comes with them, will flow if the private sector and international organisations can get at it.
