🔅 Dangote’s Latest Party Tricks
Plus, Two new jewels for UNESCO – and for Africa
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Dangote’s Latest Party Tricks
Aliko Dangote has two new party tricks.
The first is making six million tonnes of imported fertiliser vanish from Africa’s shopping list by late 2028. Speaking at Afreximbank’s annual meeting, the Nigerian billionaire promised that his $2.5 billion urea plant outside Lagos will double output and out-urea even Qatar. Give him, he says, just forty months and the continent will stop buying plant food from anyone else.
The timing is enviable. Africa’s farmers currently bleed foreign exchange to buy nutrient boosts their soils desperately need, while Nigeria’s naira gasps for dollars. Dangote’s existing granulated-urea complex already ships 37 percent of its three-million-tonne annual haul to the United States; he now wants to crank that figure past six million tonnes and list the business on the Nigerian Stock Exchange before the year is out. Dangote’s résumé includes Africa’s largest refinery, completed after delays and budget bloat but completed all the same.
The second party trick:
Apparently, Dangote is also in “why‑rent‑a‑jetty‑when‑you‑can‑own‑Nigeria’s-biggest- deepest-commercial-port” mode. The seaport will be located about an hour away from his $19 billion refinery–fertiliser complex, and is designed to out‑muscle Lekki Deep Sea Port and funnel urea, diesel, and anything else his conglomerate cooks up straight onto container ships.
This home‑grown tycoon is ready to yank West African supply chains out of chronic gridlock, and pocket the margins China or Europe would otherwise bank.
Either way, the man already worth $27.8 billion just picked up a bigger shovel, and Africa’s logistics map is about to get a brand‑new dot.
Two new jewels for UNESCO – and for Africa
UNESCO has added two more African landscapes to its World Heritage roster.
In Cameroon, the Diy‑Gid‑Biy Cultural Landscape joins the list for its stone‑walled terraces and hilltop shrines, remnants of a civilisation that farmed and fortified the Mandara Mountains between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries and whose descendants still mark harvest festivals on the same slopes.
Farther south, Malawi’s towering Mount Mulanje gains recognition as both an ecological treasure and a sacred massif where Mang’anja, Yao and Lhomwe communities still perform rain‑calling rites and initiation ceremonies among mist forests and granite caves.
Director‑General Audrey Azoulay has pledged to push more African nominations, arguing the continent remains under‑represented even as it shoulders a quarter of UNESCO’s sites “in danger.” Next in the queue are Sierra Leone’s Gola‑Tiwai forests and Guinea‑Bissau’s Bijagós Archipelago, whose deliberations continue this week in Paris.
Leila Aboulela: A Sudanese Voice Wins the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize
Sudanese‑Scottish novelist Leila Aboulela has won the 2024 PEN Pinter prize, awarded to a writer who delivers an “unflinching” vision of truth. Judges praised Aboulela, author of The Translator, River Spirit and other works, for placing the faith, migrations and interior lives of Muslim women at the centre of her fiction, calling her prose “a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration.”
The Aberdeen‑based author said the honour broadens ideas of free expression, noting its significance for “a Muslim Sudanese immigrant who writes from a religious perspective.” She will receive the award on 10 October at the British Library.
Let us know if you have read any of her works, and what you think of them…
Food for Thought
“A person always looking at the sky will never discover anything on the ground.”
— Malawi Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is from Lope, Ogooué-Ivindo, Gabon. You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.