He is the continent’s wealthiest tycoon , worth give or take $30bn. And on September 14th he launched Africa’s biggest ever initial public offering (IPO) for Dangote Petroleum Refinery, to give the mega-project its official name, hoping to raise $1.6bn at a valuation of nearly $50bn. ALIKO DANGOTE is the big man of African business. He has built its largest oil-refining complex, roughly half the size of Manhattan, on the outskirts of Lagos. If it reaches this market capitalisation when its shares begin trading on the Nigerian Exchange in November, it could instantly become one of Africa’s most valuable listed firms.
The Nigerian benchmark index is up by 71% in dollar terms this year, on a par with South Korea’s but without its artificial-intelligence bets. The Ghanaian one has increased by more than 50%. MTN Nigeria, the country’s biggest mobile-phone network, swung from a loss in 2024 to a record post-tax profit of over $700m in 2025. Bamboo lets its 2.3m users across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa invest in local and foreign stocks. In the first quarter of 2026 the platform recorded more trading in Nigerian stocks than in American ones for the first time. The average Bamboo trade is less than $50.
Whether or not it fills arenas, stock-picking is certainly becoming a popular sport across Africa. Retail investors trading shares on their phones are helping lift continental stock markets. In March Zambia’s main index was twice what it had been a year before and has stayed near there since. African companies have benefited from wiser economic policies in their domestic markets. Ghana has brought down inflation and removed lingering uncertainty about their currencies. So has Nigeria, which has also forced banks and pension-fund managers to hold more capital. Zambia is restructuring its public debt, and is a winner from the global boom for copper, of which it has deep reserves. Many locally listed companies are consumer-facing brands familiar to non-professional investors. Mr Dangote’s cement business made nearly as much. Investing in profitable firms is pitched to savers as a smarter way to build wealth and hedge against inflation than stuffing cash under a mattress. A host of fintech startups are making such wealth-building easier. The real liquidity will come from deep-pocketed institutional investors, perhaps including foreign ones. By listing his refinery in Nigeria rather than abroad, as many of the biggest African firms in sectors like mining and energy tend to, Mr Dangote may also attract more domestic smart money (he is thinking of a secondary listing in America but only a few years from now). Africa’s perky economies are already doing this. After that, who knows. But in the meantime, expect a stadium-like atmosphere on African bourses.
FTSE Russell, a global compiler of indices which in 2023 changed Nigeria’s status from a risky “frontier market” to a virtually uninvestable “unclassified” one, is reversing this decision. In Malawi, where some banks’ earnings were as much as doubling, year on year, financial advisers took to TikTok in Chichewa (the local language) explaining how to become a “part owner” of your favourite lender. “The everyday Nigerians…the traders in the market…those are the customers that we are essentially building for,” says Richmond Bassey, Bamboo’s boss. Their current upswing “is going to last a few years”, reckons David Cowan of Citigroup, an American bank.
