Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, has opened up about his family background, early struggles, and the journey to building his business empire.
Despite his privileged background, Dangote emphasized that his achievements were self-made.
“I came from a wealthy family. My late great-grandfather in the 1940s was actually the richest, you know, West African. My late grandfather was one of the wealthiest Nigerians, you know.
The family name is Dentata. That’s from my maternal side. My father too, you know, was fairly rich, you know, but he was both, you know, in business and also in politics.
But you know, David, one thing that I’m very, very proud of is that I did not inherit any money from my father. I built everything from scratch to where I am. Well, he lived in the world, but you know, I mean, whatever that I inherited from him, which means in assets, I gave that on to charity since then.
I started work with my, you know, uncle, but this few months and then I went to Lagos and now I started my own business by just, you know, buying cement, selling. You know, it was just a very low-key business. The issue is that when you look at cement, cement is what builds infrastructure and we need a lot of infrastructural deficits.
In Nigeria alone, we have about 17,000 deficit of housing and it is all over in, you know, Africa. So when we started cement in Nigeria, we realized that majority of it was actually imported and that is why we went in there, we started and it’s a long story.”
