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The International Center for Investigative Reporting has reported Kaduna State* Governor Nasir el-Rufai as stating that the Nigerian government thwarted the efforts of billionaire businessman Aliko Dangote to invest in dairy cattle in Kaduna.
He made the statement during the sixth edition of the state’s Economic and Investment Summit tagged “KADINVEST 6.0,” on Sept. 22.
According to el-Rufai, the billionaire and Africa’s richest man had planned to import 30,000 cattle from South Africa. He requested that the government give him one of its grazing reserves for conversion into a farm for the animals.
“All Aliko wanted was for import duty on powdered milk to be moved from 10 per cent to like 20 per cent to make it competitive with local production while costs are being reduced,” el-Rufai said.
However, while talks were ongoing with the Nigerian government on what Kaduna State believed would create hundreds of thousands of jobs for people and address significant security and economic challenges facing the state, the billionaire was forced to back out of the deal.
“We began a conversation with the (Federal) Ministry of Finance to do that. But all of a sudden, in the next budget cycle, import duty on powdered milk was reduced to five per cent, and he pulled out,” he said.
Dangote, the group chairman of Dangote Industries, Africa’s largest conglomerate, would have further diversified the agro-allied aspect of his business had the investment gone through.
In 2019, NaijaNews reported a move by the billionaire to invest $800 million (N288 billion) in dairy production in the Nigerian market over a three-year period.
Dangote had planned to produce 500 million litres of milk annually when the World Health Organization estimated Nigeria’s dairy needs at about 1.5 billion litres annually.
*Kaduna State is located in North-Central Nigeria. In recent years, the state had become associated with a high level of insecurity given the spates of militia attacks and inter ethnic crises that have claimed the lives of hundreds of people.
