Born in 1957, Aliko Dangote grew up in an entrepreneurial household in Kano State,
Nigeria. a federal state in Northern Nigeria. He was raised under full principles of the Islamic religion
which includes activities like; five times a day prayer, fasting, and providing zakat.
Dangote lived an upper-class life,
Dangote's grandfather was once named "one of the wealthiest people
living in Kano State". He made his fortune selling commodities like oats and rice.
At age 21, Dangote graduated from Egypt's Al-Azhar University, one of Islamic "prestigious universities".
Having spent much of his childhood
with his grandfather, Dangote quickly became interested in the world of business,
which he succeeded tremendously.
Contrary to most people's belief,
Dangote inherited a very small
portion of his wealth from his family and had to work hard for every dollar that he has now.
until now, Aliko Dangote remains the richest man in Africa, a status which he has maintained, for the
10th year in a row. Aliko Dangote is also "The Richest Black Man on Earth". in this video, we are
going to look at one of his great interviews, where he explains how he acquired all of his wealth,
and how one can be a successful businessman. please don't forget to LIKE, SHARING this video
with your friends, and family and to SUBSCRIBE to our channel if it's your first time here.
let's talk about how you made this amount of money? Which is by far the largest amount of money ,
that any individual has in Africa. so you came from a wealthy family or not a wealthy family?
I came from a wealthy family, my late great grandfather in the 1940s was actually one of the richest men
in West Africa, my late grandfather was one of the wealthiest Nigerians you know the
family name is dentata that's from my maternal side uh my father to you know was fairly rich
you know but he was both uh 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 so your father died when you were relatively young
yeah he died when i was eight years old so he didn't leave in his will a large amount of money
for you well he left in the world but uh you know i mean whatever that i inherited from him which
means in assets i gave that one to charity since then okay so did you go to college in Nigeria no
i you went in egypt egypt all right and what did you study business all right so you graduated
at what age i graduated at about 20 years old all right so you went back from egypt to nigeria yes i
went back and then and what did you get a job what did you do 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 but just
you know buying cement selling you know it was just a very low key business right so you're
20 21 years old you're buying cement you're a trader you're not i was trading yes you're not
making cement you're trading it i was trading at that time now cement is your main business we'll
talk about in a moment but why is cement such a big part of uh africa's uh you know wealth
the issue is that when you look at cement cement is what builds infrastructure and we need a lot
of infrastructural deficit in nigeria alone we have about 17 000 deficit of housing and it is
all over in uh 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 so
you ultimately were trading cement and then was it hard to get the money to keep that business going
no it wasn't really hard uh at that time i was buying domestically we started importation in 1980
because i started business 78 so by 1980 we started importing sugar rice you know commodities
generally and then we stopped the cement business because the cement i was actually doing local
trading it wasn't really import business we started input of cement in two thousand
okay so you had a cement uh trading business um somebody thought lafarge may be buying it
you decided not to sell because they wanted control and then you then decided to build
your own cement manufacturing business is that right yes i decided in 2003
uh to build my own cement that time nigeria was only producing about 1.8 1.9 million tons but
we went ahead and started with the 5 million tons of cement capacity so what year was that
this was 2 000 and we started the building end of 2003 and we finished in 2007. so now you're the
largest cement manufacturer in uh nigeria well the largest cement manufacturer in sub-saharan africa
let's suppose somebody's watching this and say i want to be like mr d'angoti i want to be a
successful businessman in africa what are the attributes or anywhere uh where what are the
attributes that you think you have brought to the table which make you for successful is it
intelligence hard work persistence all of those things what would you say are the most important
attributes i think the most important one number one david if you are going into any business
you must understand the business a to z you must know that business you shouldn't just
go and invest because somebody now will say okay hey you know there's good money in cement
then you go and jump into cement you have to understand the business in and out and that's
the difference with me i know my business in and now you can wake me up any time and ask me about
fertilizer ask me anything that we are doing and the other one is really to work very hard
and you have to have the tenacity of continuing to you have some hiccups here and there but you have
to have you have to be focused in terms of what you are doing now i've known you for a while and
i never seem to get you to yell or scream or you seem very low-key um you don't use this technique
of yelling and screaming at people or you're just very low-key and even keel to what do you
attribute that or am i wrong i think no you're not wrong that's my nature i'm always i'm very quiet
and i'm very very calm i get upset sometimes when people try to be you know either to outsmart me
or i don't like people who will not tell me the truth i always like people to look at me
through you know and tell me the truth so are you investing any in the united states we are going to
start investing you know in the united states just after this project we want to open a family office
both in new york and in london we already have an office in london which has been operating for the
last 30 years so we want to turn part of that you know as a family uh office so that we can
diversify the worth uh as you know you know i've discussed this one with you before where you know
sometimes in africa you have issues of devaluation you know uh you know so we want to really preserve
some of the family's work right now sometimes wealthy people they collect art they collect
cars they collect other things or what some of your wealth that you're not using for philanthropy
what do you do what did you collect are you a collector of things or i'm not really a collector
of arts you know the any time when i have excess money i like to put more in terms of charity i
don't really have very expensive uh lifestyle and the great pleasure of your life is just
building your company and then giving away extra money that's my greatest pleasure in life you