On the outskirts of Lagos sits Africa’s largest oil refinery, and beside it, the continent’s biggest fertiliser plant. Armed men guard the gates and the perimeters are lined with floodlights and security cameras.
Owned by Dangote Industries, a multinational conglomerate founded by Aliko Dangote, Africa’s wealthiest person, the compounds are in the Lekki free trade zone, abutting the Atlantic Ocean about 30 miles outside Nigeria’s commercial capital. The zone was designated by the federal government to develop industry and jobs.
The $2.5bn (£2bn) urea and ammonia plant opened in 2022 and the $21bn refinery opened last May and began production in January. Dangote and the government, which has a 20% stake, hope this will make Nigeria less dependent on expensive imported petroleum “and stop, once and for all, the dumping of substandard petrol products in our markets”, Dangote said in a televised speech last year.
People living near the site were happy about the developments when they were first mooted a decade ago, says Tajudeen Ismaila, 35. But the mood has changed. “We prayed for development, and we didn’t expect it to come in this form,” he says.
Thousands of people from the Ilekuru, Idasho, Okesegun, Okeiyanta and Magbonsegun communities have been evicted from ancestral lands by state authorities to make way for the development.
Local people say they were promised new schools, electricity, boreholes, jobs and compensation agreed in an MOU signed between the Lagos state government, the Ibeju Lekki local government, the trade zone managers and 12 community groups in 2007, which they understood covered all development in the area. But those the Guardian spoke to say they have received school textbooks, school tuition fees, and less than 81,000 naira (£43) in compensation.
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Lives and livelihoods have also been affected. A large expanse of forest has been removed to make way for the construction of the plants. Some rivers and streams have been dredged to accommodate vessels and pipeline networks. Some swamplands and creeks have been sand-filled to lay foundations. Crayfish and shrimp fishers have seen their catch reduced.
“A fisherman got up to four baskets in a day in the old days, but today, a basket in one week is a miracle,” says Ola Tunde, a youth worker in Lekuru. A wet market that attracted buyers from Epe and Lagos has seen customers disappear since 2017, when building the refinery began.
Those evicted now live on a patch of land a tenth the size of their former homes, says one, Alhaji Majeed Lateef. “There are no more farms. There is nowhere to fish any more.”
The fertiliser plant, planned to produce 2.8m tonnes of granulated urea a year, with ambitions to be the west African hub for production, is part-funded by a loan from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). A 2014 environmental impact report submitted by Dangote to the IFC said any impact on the biodiversity, health or livelihoods would be minor, but a “livelihood restoration plan” would be developed to compensate people for displacement and loss of resources.
Producing 650,000 barrels of petroleum a day at full capacity, the refinery will, according to its website “meet 100% of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export”. In April, the refinery began producing diesel and jet fuel for the domestic market.
Wumi Iledare, a professor of petroleum economics at Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies in the US, says the refinery could galvanise regional trade and meet energy needs across west Africa. “For me, energy poverty is as dangerous as global warming. Energy is very critical to economic growth. It is important, not just for Nigeria’s energy security but also for Africa’s energy security,” he says.
However, Yakubu Bununu, an associate professor of regional planning at Nigeria’s Ahmadu Bello University, says people are not in a position to challenge such developments. “The communities are poor and lack the resources to organise themselves better,” he says. “So they were not aware of what was coming. The issue has become more complicated.”