Alhaji Aliko Dangote

Dangote lauds Nigerians on resilience  

THE President of Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has commended Nigerians for their resilience and doggedness in the face of prevailing economic challenges, saying they have made sacrifices that will soon see the country out of the woods. Alhaji Aliko Dangote Speaking while addressing a group of small and medium scale enterprises operators, who met him in Lagos during the festive period, Dangote said that Nigerians have demonstrated the capacity to face challenges undaunted. According to him, some countries have been thrown into upheaval at the slightest economic downturn rather than joining hands together to solve the economic problems. He explained that what the country is going through, though painful, would make the nation a better self-reliant economic power house at the end. He urged the people to continue to join hands with government in finding lasting solution to the problems. He said: “We know where the problem lies and as such we only need to muster the courage to apply solution. We need to produce what we consume as opposed to importation, which takes away our forex. “This is one of the fundamental problems of our country: we import just anything and the reality is dawn on us now that we have to change this habit, this is why the federal government has been emphasising the need to go back to agriculture and total manufacturing so that we also can produce what we need and even export rather than import.” Dangote said not until Nigeria becomes a producing nation and reduce import, her economy would continue to grope in the dark noting that his company would continue to take the lead in any sector that requires the nation to look inward. He said Nigeria has no business with importation of some products, the production of which, the nation has abundant raw materials to produce. He  gave an example of milk lamented that 80 per cent of milk consumed in Nigeria is imported, a situation he described as unacceptable, given that the nation has all it takes to produce milk locally and even feed other countries. Dangote therefore promised that he would be venturing into diary production to reverse the trend saying Nigeria can produce the amount of milk needed for her citizenry. He therefore urged the people to continue to be patient and cooperate with the government at all levels while all hands are on deck to bring Nigeria back to a path of sufficiency and economic buoyancy. It would be recalled that the business mogul had indicated that his new $12 billion three in one project, the refinery, petrochemical and fertilizer plants currently under construction would create a minimum of 235,000 new jobs, both direct and indirect jobs, as it becomes operational in the first quarter of 2019. Dangote is optimistic that there will be market for the refined products because even in Africa, only three countries have effective functioning refinery with others importing from abroad.

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