Nigeria’s richest man Dangote escalates oil fight with regulator, seeks corruption probe

Nigeria’s richest man Aliko Dangote escalated his fight with regulators on Sunday, accusing them of enabling cheap fuel imports that threaten local refineries.

Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer but relies heavily on imports and Dangote’s refinery was meant to change that.

Dangote said if imports continue unchecked, they will threaten jobs, investment and energy security.
Speaking at his 650,000-barrel-per-day oil refinery in Lagos, Dangote said imports were being used “to checkmate domestic potential”, creating jobs abroad while Nigeria struggles to industrialise.
“You don’t use imports to checkmate domestic potential,” he told reporters.

Dangote called for an official inquiry into Farouk Ahmed, head of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, citing concerns over his management of the sector and allegations of private expenditures exceeding legitimate earnings.

Ahmed did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he has previously said Dangote refinery wants a monopoly on petroleum products sales, but the refinery's output can not meet local demand.

Last month, the regulator urged the president to drop plans to ban imports of refined petroleum products because local output cannot meet the national demand of 55 million litres daily.

Dangote disputes this, saying the regulator was distorting the refinery's actual capacity by reporting offtake statistics instead of the true production data.

The refinery, designed to end Nigeria’s reliance on imported fuel and save billions in foreign exchange, says it has been unable to secure all the required crude it needs because the regulator has failed to implement a rule that guarantees crude supply to local refiners before exports.

Dangote said the refinery imports 100 million barrels of crude oil annually — a figure expected to double after expansion of the refinery and limited domestic supply.

Despite these hurdles, Dangote vowed to continue with expansion plans for the facility and safeguard his investment, which he said is "too big to fail".

He also reiterated plans to list the company on the local stock market and pay dividends in U.S. dollars so “every Nigerian can own a piece of the economy.”

Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer, has long depended on imports due to mothballed state refineries.

By Isaac Anyaogu, Reuters

Video - Lagos Street art festival transforms city into open-air gallery

Participating artists want to pass the message that art ought to be accessible to everyone, not confined to indoor gallery spaces.

CGTN Africa

U.S. revokes 85,000 visas held by Nigerians and other foreign nationals

The U.S. State Department has revoked a record 85,000 visas belonging to foreign nationals, including some Nigerians, as the Trump administration intensifies scrutiny of visitors entering the United States.

According to officials, more than 8,000 of the revoked visas were student visas, a figure that is more than double the number recorded in 2024.

Officials say the visa revocations were driven by a range of security and criminal concerns, including DUIs, assault and theft, offences that together accounted for nearly half of all cancellations over the past year.

“These are people who pose a direct threat to our communities’ safety, and we do not want to have them in our country,” a U.S. official said.

The update comes as Trump, upon assuming office, vowed to lead the largest deportation drive and crackdown on illegal immigrants in the United States.

Criminal and security concerns

U.S. consular officers have been instructed to take a tougher approach to H-1B applications and deny visas to anyone found to have engaged in “censorship or attempted censorship” of protected speech in the United States.

In November, the Department of State cited assault, theft, and driving under the influence among the major reasons for the visa revocations.

Other reasons include terrorism, supporting terrorism, public safety threats, and overstaying visas.

The administration also moved to pause immigration from 19 countries already subject to partial or full travel restrictions.

Last week, the State Department announced a new visa-restriction policy targeting individuals accused of orchestrating anti-Christian violence in Nigeria and other parts of the world. The measure follows a series of deadly attacks in the West African nation.

By Adekunle Agbetiloye, Business Insider Africa

Dangote announces $700m education fund for Nigerians

Aliko Dangote, chairman of the Dangote Group, says his foundation will invest $700 million in the education of Nigerians over the next ten years.

Speaking on Sunday at the 2025 Doha Forum in Doha, Qatar, the business magnate committed to supporting over 155,000 Nigerians who will be drawn across secondary schools and universities in the country.

Dangote, during a panel session that featured Bill Dates and Sheikha Al Mayassa, discussed how innovation, philanthropy, and cultural investment are reshaping opportunity across Africa and beyond.

He said the investment is poised to reduce the number of children who are out of school in Nigeria and provide more man-power with the technical capacity to advance the economy of Nigeria.

“In Africa, we have a population of about 1.4 billion people, so partnership is important,” he said.

“Partnership also matters, that is why we partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to eradicate polio in Nigeria.

“We have a lot of children that are out of school so what we are going to launch next week is a $700 million fund to fund education.

“We will run it for ten years then we review.

“We are doing that because we have a lot of challenges in Africa, one of which is training.”

Dangote noted that the Dangote Petrochemical has trained more than 50,000 Nigerians to ensure the smooth operation of the 160,000-barrel-per-day refinery.

He said the skilled workforce will be redeployed as part of the refinery’s ongoing expansion, while his investment in education will increase talents for industries in Nigeria.

By Daniel Nnamani, The Cable

Nine women shot dead during protest in Nigeria

Nigerian Army soldiers opened fire and killed nine women protesting the army's handling of communal clashes in the northeastern Adamawa state, witnesses and Amnesty International told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The women were protesting on Monday along a major road in Adamawa's local government, Lamurde, when the soldiers shot at them after being blocked from passing, witnesses and victims' relatives told the AP in detail, first reported on Tuesday. Ten others were injured in the shooting, witnesses said.

The Nigerian Army, in a statement, denied killing anyone and blamed the deaths on a local militia it said opened fire in the area.


Amnesty International's Nigeria office said the agency confirmed soldiers killed the nine protesters, citing accounts from witnesses and families of victims.

“It shows that the Nigerian military has not changed much because of its past record of human rights violations and disregard for the rule of law,” according to Isa Sanusi, director of Amnesty International in Nigeria.

The Associated Press could not independently verify what happened.

Such killings are common across Nigeria, where soldiers often deployed in response to protests and clashes are usually accused of excessive use of force. Protests against police brutality in Nigeria’s economic hub of Lagos in 2020 ended up in what a government-commissioned inquiry described as a massacre after soldiers opened fire at the protest venue.

The latest incident happened amid a curfew that authorities imposed in Lamurde following frequent clashes between Adamawa's Bachama and Chobo ethnic groups over a prolonged land dispute.

The protesters were aggrieved that security forces, including the soldiers, were not enforcing the curfew in affected areas, thereby allowing the clashes to continue, according to Lawson Ignatius, the councillor representing Lamurde in the local government parliament.

Gyele Kennedy, who said his daughter was among the protesters shot dead, lamented in anguish that “we don’t know what came over them.”

“These soldiers were leaving where the conflict happened, and they came to pass through this place. They came and met the women protesting when one of the soldiers shot his gun in the air. After that, they opened fire on the women,” said Kennedy.

The Nigerian Army, however, denied the claims, saying its soldiers only engaged a local militia in a different part of the town.

“Without equivocation, the casualties were caused by the unprofessional handling of automatic weapons by the local militias who are not proficiently trained to handle such automatic weapons,” an army spokesman said.

The reported killings come as the Nigerian military is under scrutiny from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has alleged that Christians are being targeted in Nigeria's security crises and that the security forces are not doing enough to prevent the killings. Residents have told the AP that both Christians and Muslims are affected in the widespread violence plaguing Nigerian villages.

Amnesty International's Nigeria office called for the reported killings to be investigated and the perpetrators held accountable.

AP