Aliko Dangote, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Dangote Group defines what underlines his passion to keep investing in Nigeria as his desire to give back to Nigeria and Nigerians, especially by providing numerous employment opportunities and paying taxes, for the support the society has given him over the years. He also spoke of how the Dangote brand will soon shock the African continent in terms of size and profitability. The Dangote Brand as a global brand, he said, will be the pride of Africa
• Aliko Dangote.
You didn’t just wake up one day to start the Dangote Group, now a global oak. What is the untold story about what led to the first day? When actually was the first day?
I can’t remember the exact take-off date, but I know it was sometime in February 1978. What led to it? At that time, there was scarcity of cement because there was control on importation and only about four companies were importing – Management Enterprises, Yinka Folawiyo and Sons, Dantata Holdings and one other. Government was distributing cement through these companies. I started actually as a customer to Dantata Holdings; Usman Dantata was my uncle. I saw the opening in the scarcity at that moment and I came in and we can see how God works, how big we are now, not only in Nigeria but across Africa.
The beginning was smooth, it was okay. It was a buyers’ market, you would just deposit your money and you’d go and wait for about three months. It was during the oil boom and there was still a lot of money and there was what was called the cement armada. Demand for the product was huge and unfortunately, the ports could not even handle all the ships. At a point, there were about 400 ships waiting. In a month, there could be about 1000 ships waiting because at that time the Tin Can Island Port was not opened. Tin Can Island was opened later in that year. The business was okay, profit for we local dealers was about 40 per cent. We were making about N1,200 to N1,400 per truck depending on who was buying from you and people paid in advance. It might sound small, but a Mercedes Benz car was only about N5,000 and Volkswagen not more than a N1,000. So if you look at N1,200 then it was quite a lot of money and I was getting an allocation of minimum of four, five trucks per day. I collected N500,000 loan from my grandfather but honestly I realised I didn’t need it because I was making a lot of money. The business didn’t suffer from any cash crunch; people were paying in advance. I paid off the loan within three months.
What moulded your ambition to be much bigger?
In the long-term, it would be service and employment. In the immediate, I was just doing business. From cement, we diversified into importation of rice, fish, baby food, aluminium, several other goods. In business, you can just choose whatever type of business you want to go into. You could just be an entrepreneur, an importer. As an importer, you can decide to import all sorts of goods. There was a catch to it though. Then, we operated under the import licence and your choice of imports depended on the kind of import licence that you had. But whatever you imported at that time you would make money because it was restricted.
You could have been contented with just importing and making easy profits, rather than delve into manufacturing, with all its headache in an inclement business environment that Nigeria is. Why did you choose this dangerous minepath that many Nigerians, even with cheaply gotten capital in their hand, dread to tread?
When you are trading, you are not really adding much value to the economy and to the system; to the system in the sense that you can’t be employing a lot of people and when you employ, it will be temporary. If I am trading today, I can say tomorrow I don’t want to trade again. I can just come to the office today and decide that everybody should go home. In trading and imports, for every single item that you import, you are creating jobs outside your country. In manufacturing, one other value is that you help to exploit the local raw materials that your country has while earning for it foreign exchange. And it gets to the point that it is not only about making money but about giving a lot back, in many respects, to the society where you have made some money in the first place. That, actually, is what the Dangote Group is doing today – giving back. We are very, very grateful to Nigerians because it is Nigerians, it is the country that made us and not any other country. So it is now passion about investing in Nigeria and not about making money.
You asked about what informed our decision. We didn’t just wake up to go into manufacturing. The trading and import business got to a point where we had more cash than we needed to run our import business. We didn’t really need to go to the banks to borrow money; the first time we went to the bank to borrow money was around 1996 when we went into the industries. And it has paid off. Yes, it is a much more difficult sector, but if you are focused and you know what you are doing, you will derive more fulfilment in manufacturing and you will make more money. The challenge of industries is that you will never have rest, you will work round the clock. I can tell you that since we started industries, I have been on vacation only once for about seven days, apart from last year when I went to a health farm in Austria for six days on the persistent pressure of a friend. The trip has helped quite a lot though; I was much fatter than this last year and now I don’t have issues of weight.
When we decided to do industries, what we did was to call Arthur Andersen and we went for a retreat. At hand to address us at Sheraton Hotel was the then chairman of Nigerian Breweries plc, Felix Ohiwerei. He said something that still rankles and that is that in Nigeria, manufacturing opportunities are so large that we have not even scratched the surface. That talk really gave us the encouragement to take a deep look at manufacturing. The real push, however, was when I went to Brazil and I visited some industries. There was one single factory, a company called Aristo, that had about 4,400 workers. They also had their challenges – hyper-inflation, for example – but they were doing well. You could buy something now and by the time you went back in 30 minutes, prices could have gone higher because of the hyper-inflation. But that didn’t slow them down.
That made me to look at Nigeria carefully and critically. This is a country where there is, it’s like it’s a well-kept secret, you can make more money than anywhere in the world. But you have to work hard, it doesn’t come easy. If it’s that easy, we won’t be where we are today. At Dangote, we like to face challenges and I can tell you that the challenges in Nigeria are massive. I have looked at photographs of mine 10 years ago and I discovered that I had no grey hairs until I started manufacturing, until I started industries. But we still thank God; success doesn’t come easy, it comes with a price. Part of the big price is that you won’t have a rest. That’s what it takes. The only way to serve your country and humanity well is to be successful one positive way or the other, and to be successful, you have to work very hard. We thank God we have done by far more than what we anticipated. We never dreamt of becoming one per cent of what we are today. Yes, we had a big dream, I had a big dream, but I never expected we would be building a company this big.
Service to Humanity, Service to Country. Many wealthy Nigerians mouth this same idealism. But when it comes to investing their wealth in manufacturing, they shy away. They shy away from the demands of patriotism, so to speak, otherwise we should be talking of not less than 15-20 Aliko Dangotes and less unemployment. What differentiates Aliko Dangote from the pack?
If you want to follow what is on the ground, you would not want to invest in Nigeria. But then, when you look at it from the patriotism point of view, you cannot but ask yourself: How did those great countries become great? Let’s even look at Brazil, which we can consider as our peer, today. Their Petrobas is the fourth largest company in the world by market capitalisation. Petrobas, in the next two years, should be pumping out about 5.8 million barrels of oil. This is the sort of expansion we should be talking about, we should be planning, here in Nigeria. The Brazilian government had some shares there but they have sold them to private investors. Three weeks ago, they raised $70 billion, not in Frankfurt, not in London, not in New York, but right there in Sao Paulo, right in their own country.
This is the kind of thing we should be doing in this country: the can-do spirit. When you say we don’t want to do this or that because we don’t have power supply, it doesn’t make sense because one day, there will be constant power supply. At Dangote, as we are establishing our factories, we are also setting up our own power plants. Today the power we produce in Dangote is a little bit more than 10 per cent of what the Power Holding Company of Nigeria produces. But we are producing only for our industries and not to go and sell to anybody. If we had folded our arms and had not gone into large-scale industrialisation because of lack of power supply, do you know how many Nigerians we wouldn’t have been able to employ, how many bags of cement we would still be importing, how much in billions of naira we wouldn’t be paying to government as taxes, how we wouldn’t have been able to contribute to the Nigerian economy generally?
So when you talk of patriotism, I don’t want to go out there and be hearing of Brazil, China and co., because we have a country that God has blessed extensively. We don’t have natural disasters, the like that we see on CNN and other cable media happening in other countries. When you consider what has been affecting Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, etc., whatever Nigeria has been experiencing in terms of crises is a joke. Where other countries have mountains of volcanoes, what we have as mountains are green; you can plant things there. We have the best flat land, you can grow anything in the cheapest way. Turning Nigeria around is not really difficult, but all of us have to be patriotic. If I am not patriotic, there are countries where I can invest today in cement and I will make more money than I do here, but Nigeria is my home. I can’t change my nationality and my passport, it has to remain Nigeria. I will be more proud if Nigeria gets better than any other country. We will get there.
Even if people in government are squandering money, we should remain patriotic and, among other commitments, pay our taxes. If you pay your taxes and someone embezzles it, you will have the guts to fight him; you can scream, ‘this is part of my money you are stealing…’ Many people are not fighting government in the first place because they are not paying taxes. When you do, you should have the guts to face those in government and tell them things. There was a day I was with the late President Umar Yar’Adua and we were just having a chat and I told him: “You know sir, if I fall ill now, the federal government is supposed to rush me to the hospital to ensure I survive because in terms of Witholding Tax, Value Added Tax and Proper Tax, we have been paying an average of N50bn per annum, together with other dues.” So it’s not a tea party. If you look at the businesses you are doing which have matured, that is five years into the business and you are now within the tax bracket, you are bound to ask: Who do you work for? If you borrow a lot of money from the bank, you work for the bank, and the money government will collect from you in many taxes, you don’t make that much money. For example, you pay to government 30 per cent in Corporate Tax, 2 per cent for Education Tax, 5 per cent VAT.
Which means entrepreneurs just work for government?
Well, not really. But all these taxes mean government must keep encouraging businesses, which is what the present government is doing, especially the combination of the incumbent Minister of Commerce and Industry and the Minister of Finance, who is doing a good job as Chairman of the Economic Management Team. If government continues with this, without frequent and unnecessary change of ministers, we will get it right. Despite whatever challenges, if you ask me whether I have confidence, I will quickly tell you I have more confidence in Nigeria than in any other country. I will keep investing. As I am talking to you, we are building a 2 million tonne fertiliser plant in Edo State and that will consume about 175 million square cubic feet of gas per day.
How do you source this huge amount of gas readily? Would you be laying pipes for kilometres and kilometres, considering the cost implication?
We will lay pipelines from wherever they have gas to our plant. That is no problem. We have done that before; we did it at Obajana (the cement plant in Kogi State). And we are doing it at Ibeshe (on-going cement project in Ogun State). We don’t have a problem providing our own infrastructure. We will continue to do that because I believe so much in Nigeria. The raw materials are so vast that we have not even scratched the surface. Can you imagine when you, a farmer, gets your fertiliser on time, and not only that, you get the right quality. Right now, farmers get whatever fertiliser they are given. But we need to know that the fertiliser that will work in Jigawa State may not work appropriately in Adamawa. They don’t have the same soil type. And the same fertiliser you use for sorghum might not be the same fertiliser you will use for sugar cane. These are the issues. There is no way we can be importing one million tonnes. There are the issues of transportation and the ports. But where are the ports? Even where you have the ports, where are the vehicles? We don’t have a good network of roads. When you have two ships of fertiliser, transporters will seize the opportunity and jack up double the freight charge. And the fertiliser will always come late. By the time we have this fertiliser plant structure on ground, the economy will go high up, go haywire, since agriculture is already contributing 46-47 per cent to the GDP. Then look at power. A report says if we have one additional hour of power everyday, our GDP will go up to 9 per cent from 7.4 per cent. Just one hour of additional power, which is true. I know how much I spend on diesel everyday, diesel that we are not producing. So there are so many things we need to do to make Nigeria great. Government itself must work to make sure Nigeria becomes great. Government should create a ministry or give the Ministry of Commerce and Industry the mandate to transform Nigeria into an industrial giant. It is possible.
Only the real sector – that is manufacturing and agriculture – only industrialisation can develop any nation’s economy and its people, not imports. In Nigeria, we are doing too many imports. In dairy products alone, that is, in milk, cheese and similar products, we spend about $1 billion on imports annually. For how long will we continue this? Chicken producers in Nigeria cannot meet local consumption, let alone export. And why must they be so shortsighted as to be producing for local consumption alone? What they should look at is how to capture the rest of the West African market. That is the whole essence of these treaties. Because if Nigeria will not produce goods and go and sell them in other African countries, what is the point of signing treaties that it cannot benefit from? By signing that treaty, it means you should exploit its benefits. Brazil has 42 per cent of the world market in chicken. They are number one in the world. In cheese, they are number one or number two. In even pigs, they are number three.
They are also growing fast in vehicle manufacturing, in the automobile industry…
Yes, in vehicles, they are manufacturing, they are exporting. If South Africa is exporting cars, why can’t we? What they do abroad is simple. I will give the instance of Volkswagen. When Volkswagen went to China to set up a manufacturing plant there, the Chinese just said: “You are welcome. We will give you all the support you seek. But in your plans, also show us your export plans and how you will be sourcing materials and labour locally. All these add up to achieving many things at the same time – you address unemployment, you use local raw materials and you earn foreign exchange through exports. We can achieve the same thing here.
Some people grumble about cement manufacturing versus cement imports. Fine. But let’s look at it this way. The expectation is that Nigeria will be consuming about 20 million tonnes of cement next year. Twenty million tonnes next year will be, at least, even with the low prices abroad, about $2 billion. Why should Nigeria spend $2bn importing cement. It doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t make any economic sense at all. We have all the raw materials to produce enough cement here and Nigeria should be exporting cement to Cameroun, to Chad, to Ghana. Ghana consumes 4 million tonnes per year and they don’t produce one bag. We should be self-sufficient in cement production here, which is going to happen by next year. Without government’s favourable policy, there is no way we would achieve that. There were hitches in the last two years but we thank God government has reversed that to ensure the nation benefits from local production of cement.
If it is so glaring that the nation will benefit extensively from local production of cement rather than imports, why does the government engage so often in policy somersaults on cement, banning and unbanning imports, going to and fro, playing a yo-yo game on a vital sub-sector?
That’s why we are happy, quite pleased that an industrialist, not just an industrialist but one who owns a factory, is the incumbent Commerce and Industry minister. He knows what the real sector means to the growth of any economy, not the last two ministers of Commerce and Industry that we had who don’t know how to produce anything and they were given that vital ministry to run. They actually killed industries; they had no interest in industrial growth. They were actually a disaster and I don’t have any apology for saying so.
For Finance, there is also somebody who knows exactly what to do, that is the chairman of the Economic Management Team. Aganga is an excellent person who is concerned about creating jobs. But how do you create jobs when you don’t have a strong industrial base? It’s impossible. You can never, never create jobs unless you have an industrial base. We need to focus on the small and medium enterprises to create jobs. The policy somersaults you spoke about do not help the economy one bit. Look at our fertiliser project. It was two years ago that we first intended to start the project but we had to back off, we suspended it, we said we should wait and see where the somersaults at that time were heading. The somersault thing was actually too much and unproductive. But still, you need to look forward when investing in Nigeria; if you have to look backwards, you will never invest. If you look at the sad experiences of our elders in industrial investment – you look at the Odutola brothers, Adeola and Jimoh, you look at Chief Adebowale, you look at Chief Onafowokan, these were people who were doing well in industry but government policy somersaults rendered them bankrupt or comatose or discouraged – you look at what they went through, you will never, never want to try industries. But we have to believe that the new people that we have in government are people that will sustain this government’s policies and lead Nigeria to where it should be. In any case, you have to take a risk, but you take calculated risks and always find ways of mitigating any mishap so that tomorrow, if there is a government and policy change, you quickly know how to manage the mishap. You can’t fall, although we have seen the unfortunate situations of firms like Michelin and Dunlop. Government should foster the backward integration policy so the issue of raw materials will never be a problem, and again, there will be a lot of people who will be working on the farmlands to produce rubber, that is for companies like Michelin and Dunlop whose major raw material was rubber. I mean, for God’s sake, it’s a big industry. If in Brazil they are using these same trees to get their rubber, why can’t we do the same thing here in Nigeria?
Nigeria is always failing in such things. We planted trees for the newsprint project; it failed while government looked on. Why did we also watch Dunlop and Michelin walk away just like that?
It is funny. Somebody announced it would be closing its factory and leaving. What government should have done was go straight to the person and say, ‘please, let’s have a chat over this.’ You try to convince him not to move out, whatever that they need, it’s better you provide it. The person who is going to produce in Ghana will still bring it to Nigeria, and that’s without paying duty, in the same market. So we will lose out on all fronts. We always need to consider the benefits, the advantages and disadvantages in these things. And the number one benefit to any nation is to produce gainful employment. That’s Nigeria’s number one problem now. If ministers of the Federal Republic can be bringing their sons, their daughters, their relatives, pleading that jobs be given to them, it shows what other Nigerians are going through. There was a time that we didn’t allow two members of the same family to work here in Dangote Group, but now I’ve said no, if you are a staff and you have a child who has done well in his studies, he gets automatic employment in Dangote Group. It brings a strong bond between us and our staff and puts our staff in a happier frame of mind to be more productive. I’ve seen a company where the grandfather of a staff once worked for the same company where this particular staff worked. Such relationships are not about money any more; to most of these beneficiaries, it is about bond, about loyalty. It is also about solving unemployment problems. We want to entrench it in our system. Even if you have 10 children and they want to work, then let them come.
How big is the Dangote Group now? What is the annual turnover?
This year, we should be able to do over $3 billion in terms of turnover. For our cement, by the time we finish all our factories in Africa, we should be in the bracket of between No. 1 and 8 in the world, from zero 10 years ago. No, not even 10 years ago because production started in 2007 and we can’t talk about our imports that we were doing then because importation is not industrialisation. We started production in 2007 and between then and 2013, we will be between No. 1 and No. 8 in the world in terms of size. In terms of profitability, we will be between No. 1 and No. 4.
The Dangote Group is strongly growing into a formidable global brand; it is no longer a Nigerian name. When did the Group start announcing itself on the world stage?
We have been gradually carving a niche in international business for some years. We have had an office in Ghana for about 12 years, but that was just a trading office. But in terms of manufacturing, we started thinking about this just some two and half, three years ago. But then the international meltdown slowed that down. We went back to it, the Ghana plant, only about eight months ago, the beginning of this year and this is why we are a little bit late on it. By the middle of 2013, all our factories in Africa will be ready. We will be fully operational, manufacturing, in 12 to 14 countries in Africa alone. We have offices in Dubai, in Gibraltar, in London, in China and we will soon be opening an office in India. The 14 factories are the ones on ground now. If there are opportunities in more countries, like in Zambia and Kenya, we will definitely go there. These 14 are purely in cement. But other countries are equally asking us to come and do some other things. Senegal is calling us to do sugar, they are also calling us to do power infrastructure, that is, building power plants. In Nigeria, we have revived our proposal to government to build a 2000-megawatt power plant and sell power. We have already written a letter to that effect to government. It is big. We are already doing 400-megawatt for our own use, so we can deliver conveniently on 2000. It’s good for government because it will no longer be battling with staff pilfering spare parts, staff over-invoicing and so on. As a private investor, we are bound to supply power at all times. That is the way it is done in other countries.
The listing of Dangote Cement will quite expand market capitalisation. But the N135 price per share seems a bit high considering the mood of the market now, doesn’t it?
What has happened is that there is a merger of a lot of other capacities and a broadening of the business, cheaper in terms of production and higher in profitability. The price of Benue Cement now is N67.50k suspended. We are not collecting one share of Benue Cement to issue one share of Dangote Cement, we are collecting two shares. So two shares is what, N135k. So we are listing at N135, there is no difference. We will be having a much larger business, not a tiny company. Dangote Cement will deepen market capitalisation by about additional N2.1 trillion. That’s huge and it promises shareholders equally huge dividend payout because there is no way business in cement production can’t be good. It will broaden the base of the capital market. Going to the capital market with this kind of offer is actually a public service because, as many people would not realise about the capital market regarding this kind of companies, we could just have decided to leave them private. Nobody will know how much we are earning, we could be under-declaring in terms of taxation, we will be doing so many things people will not know.
But once you go public, you start washing your dirty linen in public. Everybody has the right to want to see your dirty linen. But going public makes you more prudent, you have to work harder and there is the issue of corporate governance. Outsiders will come in. For example, for Dangote Cement, out of 13 directors, we will be having a minimum of five external, independent directors that have no direct relationship with us. When they come in, they can tell us the hard truth. That will help us a lot. The benefit to shareholders is that they will make a lot of money when you declare dividend, instead of the money coming to me alone. For example, let’s say I am paying a dividend of N30 million, all the N30 million would have come to me alone; I may not even declare it. I would find a way of cornering my profits all to myself. Government could also be losing its 10 per cent of that.
But for me to take any money out, I must first declare a dividend. When you declare a dividend after paying 32 per cent as tax, government will collect 10 per cent of what you are getting and give you a change of 90 per cent. When it comes to taxation, since you don’t own it 100 per cent, you shouldn’t risk your name because the shareholders whose payout you are trying to protect by not paying tax will also be the ones that will be cursing you for bringing their company into disrepute when you are sent to jail. So I don’t get any benefit from cheating. Again, there is no hiding place for bosses of public companies. You can’t defraud the public company alone without doing it in collaboration with some of your staff, even your Personal Assistant, Accountant, whoever. That leaves you at the mercy of your workers. These people keep documents, they do photocopies of transactions and they withold what could be evidence that could be useful as a tool for blackmail against you in future. That worker will say, ‘this our boss is stealing company’s funds.’ The day you sack that your P.A. or Accountant for stealing the company’s money or coming late to work or whatever, he will stare you in the face and tell you that ‘oga, you, too, have been stealing company’s money,’ and, of course, he has proof. This is why a plc is better because it curtails excesses. Government should persuade all these MTN, Zain and others to come to the capital market. More foreign investors will invest, they will pay in dollars and it’s free entry, free exit. We can expand the market. It’s not right when some of these companies are making huge profits and many Nigerians are not sharing from them. One company will make $1.5bn; how many Nigerians are sharing from this $1.5bn? If it’s a plc, many more Nigerians will share from the $1.5bn.
Dangote is an international brand now; for how long will it remain a local stock?
After this listing this week (last week), next year we are taking Dangote Cement to the London Stock Exchange for listing and trading as Global Depository Receipt, GDR. (A Depository Receipt is a type of negotiable [transferable] financial security traded on a local stock exchange [this time, it will be the London Stock Exchange] but represents a security, usually in the form of equity, that is issued by a foreign publicly listed company [this time, Dangote Cement] Dangote Cement’s GDR’s bank certificate will be issued in more than one country for shares in it. The shares, to be held by a foreign branch of an international bank, will trade as domestic shares but will be offered for sale globally through the bank’s various branches).
What drives your philosophy about life and business because you seem to be different from so many Nigerians in your tribal, religious and general business complexion? Is it books that you read or some figures that are your role models?
To start with, I don’t have a role model here in Nigeria. But it is good for everyone to know that the only way you can live in harmony with everybody is not to exhibit tribal and religious traits. Once you become a tribal champion, you will never make it in life in the real sense. If you made it, it would be in your tiny little corner. Your thinking, your business, your horizon can never be broad-based. Here, our board consists of people from everywhere: Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, even foreigners. The goods he is selling, a tribal champion should realise, are not consumed by a particular tribe or religion. Where I live, there are muslims and christians and everybody lives in harmony. Yes, I follow the principles of my religion but my religion doesn’t say I should hate somebody who doesn’t practise my religion. It says I must live in brotherhood with him or her.
What is the Group’s debt profile now?
We have cleared all our loans, especially in the cement sector. What we have now are some stand-by loans, but we have more cash than what we are owing. You can’t have a $14bn company without having any debt. The only loan we have in the Dangote Group as at today is the $350mn foreign loan which we are prepared to pay off and then we will take a local loan. The local one we are taking will be for our expansion, mind you, Dangote Cement is expanding to almost about 46 million tonnes and the projects are on-going. Even if we are going back to owing, our debts will not be more than 7 per cent of our market capitalisation. If our market capitalisation is about $15bn, we don’t want to borrow more than $1mn. We will maintain that and this will make us a very robust company. Now, Dangote Group is not into debts, honest. Going forward, we will be purchasing our African assets. Dangote Cement will acquire all the African assets of Dangote Industries, so obviously there will be some payments. But it is the right hand pocket paying the left hand pocket. Balance wise, we have quite some substantial cash for future investments. That’s why we are going into this fertiliser project.
What is happening to the telecommunication licence you obtained from the federal government? The Dangote Group is quite silent on it operationally.
We have sold our 3G licence to Etisalat.
Did you sell the entire aspects of the licence?
No, the licence is not the only thing we have in telecommunication. We have the infrastructure. We are expanding the infrastructure to enable us offer services to companies, by putting up sites. Under our agreement with the Transmission Company of Nigeria, we are putting up some fibre on the sites. We will cover half of Nigeria. Right now, we have about additional 5000 kilometres of fibre optic cable that has arrived and we are laying it. It is better for us to allow MTN, Zain, Glo and Etisalat to compete among themselves in mobile communication. It’s not really our line of business so it is okay we concentrate on infrastructure. Whatever we do, we always want to be worst case No. 2, best case No. 1. If we go into this mobile communication thing, we will have to start from the beginning and we are doing a lot of things in our areas of business to engage in that kind of competition as a distraction, to go into competition which is not really our specialised area.
You have the Dangote Foundation. That is another quiet subsidiary. What has it been doing?
The Foundation has been on for over 12 years, it is not new. It’s just that we have not been making noise about its philanthropic services because we believe whatever we do is between us and God. But in the corporate world, things have changed. When people know you have that kind of money, what they ask is what have you been doing with your wealth, whether in Nigeria or abroad. And people don’t really understand the issues at stake when offering donations. Within one month, between September and October, we gave out $2mn to Pakistan because of the magnitude of its flood problem. We gave out about N120mn worth of food items to Niger Republic because of the drought there, we gave N50mn cash and N25mn worth of food items to Jigawa State which suffered flood and we gave additional food items to Jos and an additional N50mn for victims of the crisis there. In October, we gave Sokoto N100mn. Within a 30-day period, the Foundation has given out about N650-N700mn. So we are doing quite a lot and we will continue unceasingly.
The Foundation is planning to do many things not only in Nigeria but also in Africa. We are reconstituting the trustees and we will be launching other additional projects. Last year, we built about 40-something boreholes in Kaduna State and we will be doing more projects in the communities we operate. In every community we operate, we provide them with water, with power, in some we build houses for the villagers and we tar the access and even main roads. In Gboko where we have the BCC and in Obajana, we must have spent nothing less than N1bn each, in some cases even before we started operating. We will continue to do more.
