52 Things To Know About Aliko Dangote At 62

Billionaire Aliko Dangote as he marks his 62nd birthday. To mark his special day, a list of 52 unique things has been compiled about the Kano-born business guru.

Here are the facts:-
Aliko Dangote , who hails from Kano State, was born on the 10th of April 1957 into a wealthy Muslim family.
Dangote is the son of Mohammed Dangote and Hajia Mariya Sanusi Dantata.

He is a Nigerian business magnate, investor, and owner of the Dangote Group, which has interests in commodities in Nigeria and other African countries.

He is the great-grandson of Alhaji Alhassan Dantata, the richest African at the time of his death in 1955.
Following the death of his father, Aliko Dangote’s grandfather took him in and became his defacto guardian.

He learnt a lot about marketing, procuring goods, establishing customer relationships before starting business.

He started business with sales of boxes of sweets (candy bars) in primary school to his classmates as one of his first trials at entrepreneurship.

“I can remember when I was in primary school, I would go and buy cartons of sweets [candy] and I would start selling them just to make money. I was so interested in business, even at that time.

Aliko Dangote at age 21, got a loan of 500,000 Naira ($2,500) from his grandfather to start a trade in commodities, to be repaid within three years.

He took this loan, and went over to Lagos, in Nigeria, with an uncle of his. With the business loan he had secured, he started importing rice and sugar from Thailand (rice) and Brazil (sugar) respectively.

He returned his grandfather’s loan in 3 months, instead of the agreed 3 years.
He took steps towards manufacturing in 1997.

He began manufacturing with the production of produce sugar, flour, and pasta.

Dangote was educated at the Sheikh Ali Kumasi Madrasa, followed by Capital High School, Kano.

He graduated in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in business studies and administration from Al-Azhar University, Cairo.

Personal Life
Dangote is currently married.
He has been married four times, and his first three marriages ended in divorce.
He has a total of fifteen children from these marriages.

Business career
The Dangote Group was established as a small trading firm in 1977, the same year Dangote relocated to Lagos to expand the company.

The Dangote Group was established as a small trading firm in 1977, the same year Dangote relocated to Lagos to expand the company.

Today, it is a multi-trillion-naira conglomerate with many of its operations in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo. Dangote has expanded to cover food processing, cement manufacturing, and freight.

The Dangote Group also dominates the sugar market in Nigeria and is a major supplier to the country’s soft drink companies, breweries, and confectioners.

The Dangote Group has moved from being a trading company to be the largest industrial group in Nigeria including Dangote Sugar Refinery, Dangote Cement, and Dangote Flour.

In the 1990s, he approached the Central Bank of Nigeria with the idea that it would be cheaper for the bank to allow his transport company to manage their fleet of staff buses, a proposal that was also approved.

In the late 2000s, Dangote also started working in the telecommunications sector. The group has already started building a 14,000-kilometer fiber-optic cable network to cater to the entire country.

In November 2011, Dangote was awarded Nigeria’s second-highest honour, the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) by the former President, Goodluck Jonathan.

In July 2012, Dangote approached the Nigerian Ports Authority to lease an abandoned piece of land at the Apapa Port, which was approved. He later built facilities for his flour company there.

In Nigeria today, Dangote Group with its dominance in the sugar market and refinery business is the main supplier (70 percent of the market) to the country’s soft drinks companies, breweries and confectioners.

It is the largest refinery in Africa and the third largest in the world, producing 800,000 tonnes of sugar annually. Dangote Group owns salt factories and flour mills and is a major importer of rice, fish, pasta, cement, and fertiliser.

The company exports cotton, cashew nuts, cocoa, sesame seeds, and ginger to several countries. It also has major investments in real estate, banking, transport, textiles, oil, and gas. The company employs more than 11,000 people and is the largest industrial conglomerate in West Africa.

Dangote was honoured in January 2009 as the leading provider of employment in the Nigerian construction industry.

Alhaji Aliko Sani Dangote, GCON, served as the President at The Nigerian Stock Exchange since June 19, 2012 until December 2015.

Dangote reportedly added $9.2 billion to his personal wealth in 2013, according to the Bloomberg Index, making him the thirtieth-richest person in the world at the time, in addition to being the richest person in Africa.

In 2014, the Nigerian government said Dangote had donated 150 million naira (US$750,000) to halt the spread of ebola.

Dangote Refinery has been under construction for three years and is expected to be one of the world’s largest oil refineries once complete.

Presently, the ‘Dangote Group’ employs about 12,000 people in Nigeria, and it is estimated that once all the on-going projects of the company are complete, it will reach the 22,000 mark.

He owns nearly 85% of publicly-traded Dangote Cement through a holding company.

Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, founded and chairs Dangote Cement, the continent’s largest cement producer.
He surpassed Saudi-Ethiopian billionaire Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi in 2013 by over $2.6 billion to become the world’s richest person of African descent.’

Dangote is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 100th-richest person in the world and the richest in Africa, and peaked on the list as the 23rd-richest person in the world in 2014.

In 2015, Aliko won the ‘Clinton Global Citizen Award.’In 2015, it was reported that Aliko wanted to buy the ‘English Premier League’ team ‘Arsenal FC.’ On being asked, he said that he was strongly against the policies formulated by the manager, and that the first thing he would do after purchasing the team would be to fire the current manager.

Dangote recently recounted withdrawing $10m (£7.6m) just to look at it and prove to himself he was rich.

Aliko Dangote, who owns the Dangote Group, told the story at a Mo Ibrahim governance forum in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. “When you first start a business your target is to make your first million, the Nigerian businessman said.”

“But after a year or so, I realised that I had much more than $12-13bn (£9.2-10bn), and I said okay, fine, all these numbers are just written numbers.
“One day I went to a bank, at that time there were no restrictions, and I wrote a cheque and cashed $10m. And I took it home for myself. And I put it in the boot of my vehicle and I went home and I opened it and I looked at $10m and I said: ‘Okay fine, now I believe I have money.’

“I took it back to the bank the next day,” Mr Dangote added.

As of March 2019, he had an estimated net worth of US$10.6 billion.

Aliko Dangote serves as the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Dangote Industries Limited.

He serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Dangote-Bail Nigeria Limited.

He also serves as Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of Dangote Group.

Today, The Dangote Group is the largest conglomerate in West Africa.