KEY POINTS
- Dangote says he prefers Mombasa over Tanzania’s Tanga for his $17 billion East Africa refinery.
- East and Central Africa currently has only one operational refinery across the entire region.
- Tanzania’s President Suluhu said she was not consulted before Ruto publicly announced the Tanga plan.
Aliko Dangote has a location in mind for East Africa’s next big refinery. It is not Tanzania.
In an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, Africa’s richest man said he is leaning toward Mombasa, Kenya’s coastal city, as the site for a proposed refinery estimated at between $15 billion and $17 billion. His reasons are practical.
“I’m leaning more towards Mombasa because Mombasa has a much larger, deeper port,” Dangote said. He also pointed to Kenya’s economic weight. “Kenyans consume more. It’s a bigger economy,” he added.
The decision, if confirmed, would mark a significant pivot from the regional joint refinery that Kenyan President William Ruto had publicly championed just weeks earlier.
A tangled regional picture
At the Africa We Build Summit in Nairobi in April, Ruto described a shared refinery in Tanga, Tanzania, that would process crude from Kenya, the DRC, South Sudan and Uganda. He envisioned a pipeline connecting Tanga to Mombasa. The announcement raised immediate eyebrows in Dar es Salaam.
Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan said she had not been consulted before Ruto made the project public. The diplomatic awkwardness left the Tanga proposal in uncertain territory before it even got off the ground.
Dangote appears to have moved past it. He was direct about where authority over the Kenya decision now rests. “The ball is in the hands of President Ruto,” he said. “Whatever President Ruto says is what I’ll do.”
A region that badly needs refining capacity
East and Central Africa currently has only one operational refinery. South Africa has seven. North Africa has 21. West Africa has 14. The gap is wide and expensive for a region that imports most of its refined products.
The proposed Dangote facility would not match his Lagos plant, which processes 650,000 barrels per day and is expanding toward 1.4 million, but it would still represent the largest industrial investment East Africa has seen. Uganda’s competing refinery project with UAE-based Alpha MBM Investments targets 60,000 barrels per day at a cost of $4 billion. Dangote’s proposed scale is in a different category.
The Mombasa preference also feeds into his group’s stated ambition to become a $100 billion enterprise by 2030, with refining capacity at the center of that plan.
