By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
In any nation, improving human lot begins with the inspiration and sweat of just one person.
A Bible preacher. An inventor. An educationist. A philanthropist. A ruler. A reformer.
Divine enlightenment in one area of life comes but to one man at a time – he passes it on – then all others contacted in a chain get enlightened.
Long before the Sani Abacha years, the vogue among the Nigerian elite was to steal from the national treasury, by directly taking cash or by fraud, and stash the loot in foreign banks.
Some would spend such stolen money to buy homes in major cities in Europe and America.
Abacha alone stole $52 billion before he died as Head of State in 1998. Security agencies have since found other mind-boggling stolen amounts kept in homes and bank accounts by the upper class.
A rich but poor country of people with wrong mindsets helped by a lack of law enforcement.
Private initiative
Thankfully, however, some of it is changing through others with rational thinking taking private initiative to improve lives. This is the best way forward, given the circumstances in Nigeria and everywhere else in Africa.
There is no country in the world where the government provides everything. Citizens, as individuals or as groups, as well as charities, organisations, and companies and corporations complement social provision in some way.
At times they are the main or sole provider of goods or services to citizens in some sectors.
Nigerians, therefore, cannot fold their arms and blame the government for every societal wrong or inadequacy.
The government alone does not provide everything. Nor can it. This is the case in all countries in the world.
Scouting for entrepreneurs
Tony Elumelu, Chairman of United Bank for Africa (UBA), founded the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) which runs a $100 million fund to boost entrepreneurship initiative across Africa.
The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme has multi-year training, funding, and mentoring schemes that empower African entrepreneurs.
Each participant gets a $5,000 grant as seed money for a startup and may raise that with a loan of $5,000.
Launched in 2015, the programme is the largest African philanthropic initiative devoted to entrepreneurship.
It represents a $100 million commitment in 10 years to identify and empower 10,000 startups and young businesses, create a million new jobs, and $10 billion in annual revenues on the continent.
According to the TEF website, its programmes between 2010 and 2015 had focused on direct interventions like scholarships and fellowships to support future leaders.
Now, every year it selects 1,000 people with business ideas from across the continent for training in entrepreneurship. There is no age limit for participation.
A graphic artist in Lagos, Sam Abu, designs and delivers to order business cards clients select from a bouquet on his website.
He participated in the TEF scheme two years ago and has since benefited from improvement both in knowledge and in business.
“I presented my business plan and was selected to participate in the programme in 2016. The training was online and it lasted six months between April and October.
“Then all the participants from across Africa had a boot camp on Victoria Island, Lagos for four days,” Abu told TheNiche.
“I was given a grant of $5,000 for my business with a window for an additional $5,000 in form of a loan. I took the grant but not the loan.
“I was assigned a mentor who has been monitoring my progress. The training has exposed me to several sources of funding as well as motivation and help which I did not know about before.”
Andela in Lagos
Andela Inc., a technology startup in New York, trains software developers in Lagos, Nairobi, and Kampala.
A report by The Wall Street Journal in 2016 said the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which invests in both for-profit and non-profit entities, led a $24 million funding round from which Andela benefited to operate its programme in Lagos and Nairobi.
Andela, a for-profit company, was created in 2014. It aims to train 100,000 developers over the next 10 years, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Jeremy Johnson.
Many will come from Africa, where 60 per cent of more than one billion people are under 25 and many young people are out of work.
Between 2014 and 2016 Andela engaged about 200 applicants, fewer than 1 per cent of the 40,000 applications.
Participants undergo a four-year programme in which they are paid to study web and mobile software development.
After a few months, they also work for tech companies that hire Andela to offset a shortage of engineers in the United States.
In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited Andela in the tech startup hub in Onike-Yaba, Lagos.
Johnson, 34, told The Financial Times in 2017 that he set up Andela after seeing the chance to generate thousands of jobs in Africa by running a programme to find “genius-level” software developers, who then work remotely for US and European companies.
Andela has received inquiries from more than 40,000 aspiring Nigerian software engineers since it started in Lagos in 2014. Fewer than 300 have been accepted.
Tolulope Komolafe, 28, a computer science graduate, applied to join one of Andela’s boot camp-style training programmes, and was among the first to be accepted.
“It was intense,” Komolafe said of the training. “This is something you have to put everything you have into.”
Andela identifies Africans with an aptitude for coding and then equips them with the technical and teamwork skills they need to work remotely for technology companies in the West.
Partners range from tech giants, including IBM and Microsoft, to startups such as Everplans, an end-of-life planning platform based in New York’s Flatiron district, whose software Komolafe has helped to develop from Andela’s office in Lagos.
With job vacancies for developers in industrialised countries far outstripping candidates, Andela believes it has captured only a fraction of the potential demand.
“We’re solving the global technology skills gap problem,” said Nadayar Enegesi, an Andela co-founder, speaking at the company’s Lagos premises, where dozens of coders sit tapping at keyboards in near silence.
The Financial Times added that Andela is spurring the broader evolution of the Nigerian tech sector, where online payments companies and retailers have set the stage for rapid growth in e-commerce.
“The companies working with us are generally not doing it because of interest in social impact. They are doing it because they need real talent,” Johnson said.
At the end of her tenure in Andela’s four-year cycle for engineers, Komolafe scouted for jobs with other startups – but also aims to become a founder too.
“Four years ago, most people would probably say, ‘I want to work in a bank, or in Shell or Chevron. Right now, people are saying, ‘I want to be a developer – because then I make a change, and I can actually say that what I do helps people,’” she said.
Western charity not enough
Africa does get some help through grants from Western charities, such as Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
But there can be no real progress unless inspired individuals on the continent put both their expertise and money on the table to benefit others. They can do this alone or as a group of private citizens or in collaboration with the government.
Poverty amid millionaires
In 2015, the number of millionaires in Nigeria rose to 15,400 or 305 per cent from 5,000 in 2000 when the last study on wealth was conducted by Forbes Wealth Report.
Their combined net worth was about $150 billion.
Forbes Wealth Report put the total wealth of top 15 wealthy Nigerians at about $36 billion.
In the top 10 are Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga, Folorunsho Alakija, Femi Otedola, Abdulsalamad Rabiu, Theophilus Danjuma, Orji Uzor Kalu, Tony Elumelu, Jim Ovia, Mohammed Indimi, and Tunde Folawiyo.
There is so much poverty in the land that even the $100 million palliative from Elumelu is simply a drop in the ocean.
Four on this list of top 10 Nigerian millionaires – Dangote, Rabiu, Danjuma, and Indimi – are from the North where diseases, illiteracy, and poverty turn even children into professional beggars.
The Giving Pledge
In other parts of the world, some billionaires are giving and have pledged to continue to give back to society that helped them make their money.
The Giving Pledge campaign was formally announced in the US in June 2010 and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett began recruiting members.
In December that year, according to Wikipedia, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett signed “The Giving Pledge”, promising to donate to charity at least half of their wealth over the course of time.
They invited others among the wealthy to join The Giving Pledge, which campaigns and encourages them to donate 50 per cent or more of their wealth to charity.
The goal is to inspire the wealthy people of the world to give at least half of their net worth to philanthropy, either during their lifetime or upon their death.
By May 2017, up to 158 individuals and/or couples were listed as pledgers.
As of 2018, the pledge has 175 signatories, either individuals or couples; from 22 different countries. Most are billionaires, and their pledges total over $365 billion.
At least $365 billion of giving has been pledged by 139 individuals, with a combined 2016 net worth of $731 billion.
The pledgers include
Bill and Melinda Gates (US), Warren Buffett (US), Larry Ellison (US), Michael Bloomberg (US), Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan (US).
Azim Premji (India), Vladimir Potanin (Russia), Hasso Plattner (Germany), Richard and Joan Branson (UK), and Samuel Yin (Taiwan).
In 2010, Zuckerberg’s Education Foundation donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools, the public school system of Newark, New Jersey.
As of May 2018, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated nearly $1 billion in various projects in India, particularly in fields related to health, and woman and child welfare.
Givers never lack
Dangote is the only one among Nigerian billionaires known to be into heavy philanthropy in Nigeria, in Africa, and elsewhere in the world.
Most others, North and South, largely hoard wealth as a war chest to protect themselves and lord it over the poor.
The spiritual principle, though, is that givers never lack.
“It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35 NKJV).
“Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7).
“He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully” (2 Corinthians 9:6).
Therefore, Dangote, the biggest philanthropist of them all, has remained on top the Nigerian rich list for 10 years running.
He is also the richest in Africa. Even if his wealth is only in material terms.
In 1977, Dangote got a N500,000 loan from his grandfather with which he imported and sold cement. He repaid the loan within six months.
He made money, and became a millionaire, and could have expanded his quarry by simply trading in imported products.
But he went into production, using mainly local raw materials, to help grow the Nigerian economy and create jobs.
It paid off for him and for country.
In 2007, exactly 30 years after he started out, he became a billionaire in dollars. And he is still creating jobs up to now.
Dangote’s sights are currently on building an oil refinery in Lekki, Lagos with a capacity of 650,000 barrels a day, which will cost at least $12 billion to complete.
It will be the biggest refinery of its type in the world.
Dangote told The Financial Times he plans to produce enough petrol and kerosene to meet the demand of all of Nigeria’s 180 million population and have some left over for export.
A separate fertiliser plant will produce 3m tonnes a year of urea, enough to meet the current needs of farmers nationwide, and a petrochemicals factory will make a combined 1.3m t/y of polyethylene and polypropylene.
The refinery will absorb 30 per cent of Nigeria’s daily oil production and shift the curve of its import-export.
Already, the Dangote Group dominates Nigeria’s cement industry, and much of that of Africa.
When the refinery enters production in the first quarter of 2020, it will solve many of the structural problems that have plagued Nigeria since it discovered huge quantities of oil 50 years ago.
Because the country exports crude and imports refined products that are subsidised by the state, a plethora of dealers and middlemen has sprung up to make easy fortunes out of the arbitrage opportunities.
Dangote said his refinery will save Nigeria billions of dollars in foreign exchange and remove the pickings that have benefited generations of entrepreneurs diverted from production to speculation.
Providing basic needs
The Dangote Group is the largest indigenous industrial conglomerate in Africa. It is one of Nigeria’s most diversified business conglomerates.
The current workforce is 30,000.
But, in addition, Dangote plans to produce 700,000 tonnes of sugar annually over the next four years. “We may employ at least 45,000 people to reach this target. That is the only way to create jobs,” he said.
Among the output of the Dangote Group are industrial and household items such as
Cement – manufacturing and distribution
Sugar – manufacturing/refining and distribution
Flour and Semolina – milling and distribution
Pasta – manufacturing and distribution
Salt – refining and distribution
Food Seasoning – production and distribution of seasoning cubes
Vegetable Oil – refining and distribution
Tomato Paste – manufacturing and distribution
Crude Oil Refinery – refining and distribution
Petrochemicals – refining and distribution
Fertilizer – manufacturing and distribution
Packaging Materials – manufacturing and distribution
Logistics – port management and haulage
Real Estate
Food and Beverages
Aliko Dangote Foundation
Emphasis on self-reliance
The Dangote Group strives for self-reliance in Nigeria in all the sectors where it operates. It has ambitious plans to set up world-class projects in new sectors such as agriculture, petroleum refinery and petrochemicals, fertilizer, and telecom.
Uplifting lives with $1.2b
In 1994, Dangote set up the Aliko Dangote Foundation and endowed it with $1.2 billion, funded from his personal fortune and shares from his publicly listed companies.
The Foundation supports large-scale initiatives in education, health, as well as meaningful change in the lives of the youth and women.
Its interventions include a national cash transfer programme that disburses small grants ranging between $50 and $80 to poor rural women and youths seeking to start small businesses.
The Foundation also partners with the Bank of Industry to provide low-interest loans to micro, small, and mid-size enterprises.
When former President Goodluck Jonathan appointed him Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Flood, Dangote donated N2.5 billion at the launch, the same amount Abuja released to ameliorate the suffering of flood victims.
Before then officials of his Foundation had travelled to all the states ravaged by flood and provided relief materials and funds worth billions of naira.
In recent years, the Foundation has
Donated N50 million in aid for victims of communal clash between Yoruba and Hausa traders and residents in Ile-Ife, Osun State.
Donated N500 million to assist victims of fire outbreaks in five major markets in Kano.
Donated billions of naira in cash to internally displaced persons (IDPs), and Dangote himself has pledged to invest N2 billion to create jobs and end hunger for those in IDP camps.
Established a Micro Grant Programme (MGP) to help rural dwellers undertake petty trading. Up to 256,500 women in Kano, Jigawa, Kogi, Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe States have benefited.
. Donated 150 cars to the Nigerian Police Force for effective crime control across the country.
. Donated N2 billion for the building of 200 housing units for persons displaced by Boko Haram insurgents in Borno State as well as giving each of the 200 beneficiaries of the houses a cash donation of N100,000 to start a business.
Support for women
The Foundation plans to extend the MGP to 1,000 women in each of the 774 local government areas in the country to help reduce poverty.
Dangote said at the launch of the scheme in Lagos: “I believe that supporting social and economic change through investments and interventions that improve the lives of the less fortunate is what will make a positive difference in the growth of my nation.”
He said the Foundation
- Focuses on health and nutrition to reduce the number of lives lost to malnutrition and disease through access to quality healthcare and nutrition with emphasis on children.
. Builds primary health care centres.
- Drills boreholes for WASH (Water Sanitation and Hygiene) programmes.
- Partners with the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation and states to eradicate polio and increase routine immunisation coverage.
- Built a diagnostic centre and operating theatres at the Murtala Mohammed Hospital in Kano.
- Engages in malnutrition eradication programmes across 13 states in the North.
- Plans to reduce the number of out-of-school children, support talented under-privileged young people to achieve their potential, and educate girls and women on health-related issues.
The MGP supports the poor to increase their income. It is one component of the economic empowerment programmes of the Dangote Foundation.
“We have chosen to partner with state governments to support women because in Nigeria, as in other developing countries, they bear the burden of poverty.
“And it is through their economic activities from the home, the market place or the farmlands that they keep the family and the community going, meeting basic needs.
“Our research at Dangote Foundation shows that just a little push can help establish, sustain or grow several types of economic activities by our women,” Dangote said.
“We believe these small grants will improve women’s businesses and the well-being of their families and communities.
“This is one of the goals of Dangote Foundation’s Community Development Services.
“It is their efforts and business success that will strengthen family and community bonds that are needed to transform this great state and this great country.”
Africa’s biggest philanthropist
However, Dangote stressed, “I do not only want to be known as Africa’s richest man, but the biggest philanthropist.”
He made the point on May 21, 2018 at the inauguration of the Foundation’s “one-off and unconditional micro-grants” programme in Minna.
The scheme targets 25,000 disadvantaged and vulnerable women in Niger State, who will each get N10,000 cash “to boost their household income generation.”
He disclosed that his Foundation has ring-fended N10 billion to empower vulnerable women in the 774 councils across Nigeria.
On the same May 21, Dangote also reiterated his desire to be Africa’s most generous man in Abuja at a meeting of business leaders and philanthropists with United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.
He canvassed that Nigeria’s growth be inclusive.
“I set up Dangote Foundation in 1994 based on a simple premise; to whom much is given, of him much is required. That has meant, for me, looking at the poor among us and being compelled to bring some relief.
“I don’t only want to be known as the richest person in Africa, but the biggest philanthropist,” Dangote repeated.
“I want to use my resources and my voice to help shape a better Nigeria, and I call on fellow business men and women that are here with us, to work in their own ways to join me in this trajectory.”
Dangote noted that Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of over $500 billion, and until the recent slowdown from the drop in oil prices, it had been growing at over 6 per cent annually.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “the growth has not been inclusive. Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world that experience rapid economic growth without any improvement in poverty levels.
“More than 60 per cent of the population in the North West and North Eastern part of Nigeria are in severe poverty as we speak today. The situation has been compounded by falling oil prices.
“In the next four years, Nigeria would be self-sufficient in rice, in sugar and also other commodities, and would be the largest exporter of petroleum products and fertilizer in Africa, with millions of jobs being created.”
Dangote was referring to his refinery under construction.
Those present at the meeting, to whom he directed his appeal, included fellow Nigerian billionaires – Alakija (Vice Chairman of Famfa Oil), Ovia (founder of Zenith Bank), and Elumelu.
