President of Dangote Industries Limited, Aliko Dangote, has pushed back at suggestion that he is a monopolist with penchant to drive out others in his lines of business.
Dangote for years has faced criticism bordering on claim that he does not allow competitors to thrive and uses his connection to suppress and frustrates them out of the industries he is in.
Reacting to the charge in an interview he granted Bloomberg on Thursday, the African richest man said, what he has working well for him is not monopoly but his tendency to be industry’s trailblazer.
“If you are going to call first movers into business monopolists, then you will never establish a manufacturing base, or you’ll never establish anything that you call a country,” Dangote said.
He also told of the stress he faced to have the refinery in place, saying if he had foreknowledge of what he was going to encounter in terms of challenges he won’t make the move: “Right from the beginning of building the refinery, we realised that nobody could provide us with any service. You have to provide almost everything by yourself.
“If I knew what I was going to go through, I wouldn’t have tried it,” the billionaire businessman said.
