Shell and Chevron Abandoned This Coastline. Dangote Just Bought In.

HOW ALIKO DANGOTE IS QUIETLY BUILDING AFRICA'S LARGEST PORT Shell, Chevron, and BG Group walked away from this stretch of Nigerian coastline in 2013, leaving $16 billion in planned investment behind. Now Aliko Dangote — Africa's richest man — has filed permits to build on the exact same ground. His plan: a deep sea port more than seven times the footprint of Tanger Med, Africa's current biggest, on 10,000 hectares of Atlantic coast at Olokola. This is the story of why Nigeria, Africa's most populous country and one of the largest economies on the continent, lost its grip on its own coastline — and how one private company plans to take it back. Nigeria's main port at Apapa, in Lagos, costs the economy an estimated $19 billion a year in congestion. Ships wait two weeks to dock. Trucks queue for ten kilometres. So much cargo flees to neighbouring countries that tiny Togo now handles more containers than Lagos. Meanwhile, Dangote's $20 billion refinery — the largest single-train refinery in the world — is running at full capacity with nowhere big enough to ship from. The answer is the Olokola Deep Sea Port: an integrated industrial complex with a planned gas pipeline from the Niger Delta, an LNG operation Dangote's own executives say will surpass Nigeria's state-backed exporter, and a captive anchor tenant already producing at scale. If it works, it doesn't just give Nigeria a second deep-water gateway — it puts a single private group in control of one of the largest maritime hubs on the Atlantic coast of Africa. In this video: how the Olokola project died twice before, the real cost of the Apapa bottleneck, how Olokola compares to Tanger Med and Lekki Deep Sea Port, the Vision 2030 expansion plan, and what still has to go right. Subscribe for more documentaries on the megaprojects rebuilding Africa.