KEY POINTS
- Aliko Dangote offered to build a Tanzania refinery matching his 650,000-barrel-per-day Lagos plant.
- Kenya’s President William Ruto confirmed Kenya and Uganda are already in talks on the project.
- The proposed Tanga refinery would sit at the end of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline carrying Ugandan crude.
Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, has put a bold offer on the table: build East Africa a crude oil refinery as big as his 650,000-barrel-per-day plant in Lagos. Kenya’s President William Ruto says talks with the Nigerian billionaire are already underway.
Dangote made the pitch Thursday at the inaugural Africa We Build Summit in Nairobi. The Africa Finance Corporation hosted the event, drawing heads of state, investors and development finance institutions. “If the president of Kenya or Uganda supports us, we’ll build an oil refinery in this region just as big as the one in Lagos,” Dangote said.
Ruto confirmed the conversations on the spot. He said Kenya and Uganda are working with Dangote to site the refinery in Tanzania, with a pipeline running from Mombasa to Tanga in northeastern Tanzania. Notably, the plant would process crude from the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.
Why the timing matters
The proposal lands amid acute fuel supply anxiety across East Africa. Specifically, the US-Iran war has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, cut access to Gulf supplies and pushed freight costs sharply higher. Countries that relied on Middle East and Europe imports are scrambling.
Dangote’s Lagos refinery already supplies refined petroleum to Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and other African nations. In March 2026 alone, the plant exported 12 cargoes totaling 456,000 metric tons to five African countries: Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Tanzania, Ghana and Togo.
Tanga is no random pick. Indeed, it is where the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, the 1,443-kilometer system carrying Ugandan crude from the Lake Albert oilfields to the Indian Ocean, terminates. EACOP should deliver first oil in the second half of 2026.
A refinery at Tanga would sit at the receiving end of that pipeline, converting Ugandan crude into refined products for regional distribution rather than shipping it raw to Asia or Europe.
Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, also at the summit, drove the point home. He said Uganda is already building a smaller 50,000 to 60,000-barrel-per-day refinery for the local market, but he drew a harder line on value addition.
Specifically, Museveni noted that unprocessed gold sells for $60,000 per kilogram while processed gold fetches $168,000. Exporting raw materials, he said, amounts to exporting jobs.
A bigger play
Now the East Africa pitch fits Dangote’s broader push since his Lagos refinery hit full capacity in February 2026. He has set a $100 billion revenue target by 2030 through a $40 billion investment program that includes doubling Lagos capacity, expanding into petrochemicals and building fertilizer operations.
Furthermore, the financing scaffolding is rising in parallel. In March 2026, Afreximbank anchored $2.5 billion of a $4 billion syndicated loan for the refinery, with Access Bank co-arranging. Dangote also plans a pan-African IPO of 5 to 10 percent of the refinery for June to July 2026.
According to Billionaires Africa, building a second major refinery in East Africa would be a separate, enormous undertaking. So far, no public details have emerged on financing structure, timeline or site. However, Thursday’s summit produced a public alignment of political will between Dangote, Ruto and Museveni.
