Friday, February fourteenth, the UN says at least 22 people have been killed in a village in the Northwest region of Cameroon. Over half of those killed were children. No one has claimed responsibility for Friday’s incident but the opposition parties blame the killing on the government.
Aliko Dangote Africa's richest man shifts goal from cement to oil and gas
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Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote, plans to launch
Nigeria's first private crude oil refinery by 2019 while almost doubling his
cement production on the continent by adding plants in eight countries as he
shrugs off a regional economic downturn.
Dangote told Reuters the $12 billion refinery would have
a capacity of 650,000 barrels a day, cornering the market in Africa's most
populous country, where fuel shortages are a perennial problem.
Until recently, Nigeria was Africa's biggest crude oil
producer but it imports 80 percent of its fuel because poor maintenance means
its four refineries never reach full output. Its current daily consumption is
260,000 barrels, according to the International Energy Agency.
A slump in commodity prices has hammered Nigeria's
economy - along with many others on the continent - and raised the cost of
borrowing but Dangote, whose business empire stretches from cement to flour and
pasta, is pushing hard into oil and gas.
"It will be ready in the first quarter of
2019," the billionaire founder of Dangote Cement said of the refinery.
"Mechanical completion will be end of 2018 but we will start producing in
2019."
Dangote said the plant, which will include a $2 billion
fertilizer unit, was being funded through "loans, export credit agencies
and our own equity".
Some $3.25 billion had come from local and foreign banks,
while the central bank had also chipped in. The IFC, the private sector arm of
the World Bank, has lent $150 million.
Dangote also has plans for a gas pipeline through West
Africa. Nigeria has the world's ninth largest proven gas reserves, at 187
trillion cubic feet (tcf), but loses half of it to flaring and re-injection.
Despite the new focus on oil and gas, the business
magnate said he planned to build cement plants in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya,
Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Zambia by 2018. Another plant will open in
Congo Republic by September, he added.
A cement plant in Ivory Coast would triple output to 3
million tonnes, up from an initial target of 1 million, he said, while two new
plants in Nigeria would add 6 million tonnes annually.
"As at now, what we have in operation is almost
about 45 million tonnes, so we have just another 40 million tonnes to go,"
he said, affirming an Africa-wide production target of 85 million tonnes a year
by 2018.
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