By Kunle Oshobi
Nigeria’s foreign reserves recently touched $54.18 billion, the highest level in eighteen years. Predictably, the Tinubu administration has moved quickly to claim this as vindication of its “reforms”, subsidy removal, naira devaluation, and tax changes. What the government is far less eager to discuss is where this dollar inflow is actually coming from, and whose vision, policy, and capital made it possible in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth for the administration is this: the single largest driver of Nigeria’s reserve recovery is not a government policy. It is one refinery, built by one Nigerian businessman, using a productive capacity that a very different administration — Obasanjo/Atiku — spent eight years deliberately building.
The Numbers Behind the Headline
The Dangote refinery is now saving Nigeria an estimated $10 billion annually that would otherwise have left the country to pay for imported petroleum products, a figure the government’s own officials have cited approvingly at public events, even while crediting themselves elsewhere for the reserve position that figure helped create. Beyond import substitution, the refinery is generating an additional estimated $6 billion in fresh foreign exchange earnings through the export of refined products.
Together, that is roughly $16 billion in annual foreign exchange impact, a seismic shift in Nigeria’s balance of trade position that has done more to rebuild the reserves than any subsidy removal or currency float ever could on its own.
This is not a government achievement. It is a private-sector achievement that the government happens to be presiding over.
Where the Capacity to Build This Refinery Actually Came From
To understand why this matters, it helps to ask a simple question: how did one Nigerian businessman come to have the industrial capacity, balance sheet, and regulatory pathway to build the largest single-train refinery in the world? The answer traces directly back to policies designed and driven during the Obasanjo/Atiku administration, when Atiku Abubakar chaired the National Economic Council and was central to the era’s private-sector-led economic strategy.
The Cement Industry Backward Integration Policy.
In the early 2000s, the Obasanjo/Atiku government restricted cement imports and required manufacturers to invest in local production capacity instead. That single policy decision transformed Dangote from an importer and trader into an industrial manufacturer, forcing the build-out of the engineering, project management, and large-scale industrial execution capability that would later make a $20 billion refinery project conceivable at all. Nigerians who only encountered Dangote as a cement brand rarely connect that this is where his capacity to execute mega-projects was actually forged, by policy design, not accident.
The Bank Consolidation Programme.
Nigeria’s banking sector before 2004 was fragmented into dozens of undercapitalised institutions, none large enough to finance a genuinely big-ticket industrial transaction. The Obasanjo/Atiku-era bank consolidation programme, which raised minimum capital requirements and forced a wave of mergers, produced the handful of well-capitalised Nigerian banks capable of underwriting billion-dollar financing structures. Without that consolidation, no Nigerian bank would have had the balance sheet to participate meaningfully in financing a refinery of this scale, and Dangote would have been forced to rely entirely on foreign capital, on foreign terms.
The Licensing of Private Sector Refining.
For decades, refining petroleum products in Nigeria was treated as a state monopoly through NNPC’s ageing refineries. The policy shift that opened refining to private investment, again a hallmark of the Obasanjo/Atiku reform era’s broader philosophy of private-sector-led productivity, is the specific regulatory pathway that made it legally possible for Dangote to build and operate a refinery in the first place.
The Irony of Where It All Started
There is a further irony worth remembering. The seed of the Dangote refinery was planted not in triumph but in a botched privatisation. In 2007, a Dangote-led consortium acquired majority stakes in the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries, only for the incoming administration to reverse the sale months later under union pressure. Rather than accept defeat and walk away from refining altogether, Dangote redirected that ambition into building an entirely new refinery from scratch, one that would eventually dwarf the combined capacity of all four of Nigeria’s moribund state refineries put together. The instinct to build, rather than wait for the state to fix what it could not fix, was itself a product of the private-sector confidence that the Obasanjo/Atiku years had instilled in Nigeria’s leading industrialists.
A Government Harvesting What It Did Not Plant
None of this diminishes Aliko Dangote’s own achievement, which is considerable. But it should thoroughly deflate the Tinubu administration’s attempt to claim credit for a reserves position built substantially on a refinery whose entire foundation, the industrial capacity, the financing capability, and the regulatory pathway, was laid nearly two decades ago by an administration this government did not run.
What has this administration actually added to Nigeria’s productive capacity in three years? Subsidy removal and currency devaluation are demand-side adjustments, they change what things cost, not what Nigeria makes. They did not build a single refinery, a single factory, or a single new productive asset. They are, at best, housekeeping measures that a functioning economy eventually has to undertake. They are not a growth strategy, and they are certainly not the reason a $20 billion, 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery exists on Nigerian soil today.
The Case for Returning to the Path That Actually Works
Nigerians do not need to speculate about what genuine private-sector-led growth looks like, because the country has already lived it. Under the Obasanjo/Atiku administration, Nigeria was not merely growing, it was the fastest-growing economy in Africa and, for a period, the second-fastest-growing economy in the entire world. That was not an accident of oil prices alone; it was the product of deliberate policy choices, backward integration, bank consolidation, and market-opening reforms, that gave Nigerian industrialists the tools, the capital, and the confidence to build at scale.
The Dangote refinery is living proof that those policies worked, decades after they were designed. The question Nigerians should be asking is not whether this administration deserves credit for reserves it did not build the foundation for, it plainly does not, but whether the country can afford another term of an administration whose only economic instruments are subsidy removal and devaluation, when what actually rebuilt Nigeria’s reserves was private-sector productive capacity, deliberately cultivated by policy.
An Atiku presidency represents a return to that proven model: policies that empower Nigerian industry to build, manufacture, and export, rather than policies that merely manage the pain of an economy standing still. Nigeria has already seen what its private sector can do when government gets the enabling policy right. The Dangote refinery is the receipt. The only question now is whether Nigeria will elect a government that knows how to write the next one, or continue rewarding one that is merely cashing a cheque someone else signed almost twenty years ago.
Kunle Oshobi is the Head of Strategy and Planning, and Chairman Narrative Command of The Narrative Force
