Reported by Ariajegbe Sylvia Esezobor
Aliko Dangote, President of the Dangote Group and Africa's richest man, has publicly named his investment in Nigeria's textile industry as the single biggest business mistake of his decades-long career, offering a rare and candid look at a costly setback behind one of the continent's most celebrated industrial empires.
Dangote made the disclosure during an interview with journalist Ojy Okpe on Arise Television, where he reflected on the ventures that shaped his rise from a Kano-based trader to the head of a conglomerate spanning cement, sugar, fertiliser and petroleum refining. Speaking plainly about the failure, he said his biggest business mistake was textiles, recalling that the sector ultimately proved unsustainable despite the scale of capital poured into it.
According to Dangote, the group invested billions of naira in the textile business over the years, including establishing Dangote General Textile Mills in Kano and acquiring the stake of a foreign shareholder in Nigerian Textile Mills. At its peak, the venture represented a significant bet on domestic manufacturing at a time when Nigeria's textile sector was among the largest employers in the country's industrial base. That bet did not pay off. Dangote attributed the eventual collapse to a combination of weak policy protection for local producers and overwhelming competition from cheaper imported goods, specifically pointing to what he described as dumping by Chinese and Indian manufacturers that undercut domestic production and made the business impossible to sustain profitably.
The human cost of the closure was substantial. Dangote disclosed that the shutdown led to the layoff of almost 8,000 workers across the textile operations, with 6,920 of those job losses concentrated at the Nigerian Textile Mills facility in Ikeja, Lagos, alone. He said the experience left a lasting impression on how he approached subsequent investments, stressing the importance of ensuring that businesses remain commercially viable on their own terms, rather than depending indefinitely on government protection that could be withdrawn or eroded over time.
The remarks arrive at a moment when Nigeria's manufacturing sector continues to grapple with many of the same pressures that Dangote described. Local producers across several industries have long complained about the difficulty of competing with lower-cost imports, inconsistent trade enforcement, and the broader structural challenges of manufacturing in Nigeria, including unreliable power supply and elevated production costs. Nigeria's textile industry in particular has undergone a dramatic decline over the past two decades, shrinking from a sector that once employed hundreds of thousands of workers to a fraction of its former size, a trend widely attributed to smuggling, cheap imports and the erosion of policy support for local mills. Cotton farmers have separately raised concerns in recent days about loan recovery pressures they say threaten the survival of Nigeria's cotton value chain, underscoring the sector's continuing fragility.
For Dangote personally, the textile setback stands in contrast to the trajectory of his broader business empire, which has increasingly concentrated on capital-intensive industrial projects rather than the kind of labor-intensive, import-exposed manufacturing that characterized the textile venture. The most prominent example is the Dangote Petroleum Refinery, a project the billionaire has previously described as the biggest financial gamble of his career. The refinery's total cost swelled to nearly 23 billion dollars, more than double its original 10 billion dollar budget, financed through a combination of bank loans, investor equity and a large intercompany loan from the group's holding company. Dangote has said the scale of the risk involved was so significant that a failure of the project could have been financially catastrophic for him personally. That refinery has since become a central pillar of the group's strategy to reshape Africa's energy and industrial landscape, and it recently began a public share offer on the Nigerian Exchange, giving retail and institutional investors a stake in the venture for the first time.
In the same wide-ranging interview, Dangote also touched on the future leadership of his business empire, indicating that one of his three daughters could eventually take over the conglomerate rather than a son. He said he did not believe a male heir would necessarily have performed better in the role, and framed his broader ambition beyond the immediate family business as the industrialization of the African continent, expressing confidence that other African entrepreneurs and companies would increasingly follow that path in the coming years. He has also recently criticized wealthy Africans for prioritizing personal spending, such as private aircraft, over reinvestment in productive industry, a theme consistent with his public positioning as an advocate for industrial development on the continent.
Analysts and industry watchers say Dangote's willingness to openly discuss the textile failure offers useful insight into the risk calculus behind Africa's largest industrial conglomerate, illustrating how early setbacks informed a later strategy weighted toward sectors where the group could exert greater control over input costs, scale and government policy alignment, such as cement, fertiliser and oil refining. At the same time, the textile industry's continued struggles suggest that the structural challenges Dangote encountered years ago, weak protection for domestic manufacturers and persistent import competition, remain largely unresolved for smaller Nigerian producers who lack the capital reserves to absorb similar losses.
As Dangote Group moves forward with its refinery expansion and its newly launched public share offer, the textile episode serves as a reminder that even Africa's most successful industrialist has not been immune to costly missteps, and that the broader policy environment for domestic manufacturing in Nigeria remains a significant factor shaping which industries can realistically thrive at scale.
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