When African companies build across borders, everyone wins

By Agatha Emeadi

When Aliko Dangote and Kenyan President William Ruto broke ground on a 6 billion oil refinery at the Port of Lamu on September 30, the ceremony carried significance that extended well beyond petroleum. The 700,000-barrel-per-day facility, targeted for completion within 40 months, is set to become the largest single foreign direct investment in Kenyan history, and the investor behind it is not European, American or Chinese. He is Nigerian.

The Lamu project follows the Dangote Group’s transformative refinery near Lagos, which listed on the Nigerian Exchange in September, marking the largest initial public offering in African history. That facility has already shifted Nigeria from a chronic fuel importer to a net exporter of refined petroleum, and the Lamu plant is designed to do the same for East Africa. President Ruto described the

investment as rooted in “energy security, industrialization and regional integration,” and three East African governments, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia, have signalled interest in taking a combined 30 per cent equity stake in the project.

What makes the Lamu groundbreaking and instructive is not simply its scale but what it represents about the changing direction of capital on the continent.

For decades, the dominant pattern of investment in Africa flowed from outside, on terms that were often extractive and rarely structured to build lasting domestic capacity. The emerging pattern is different. Nigerian companies are now among the most consequential investors in other African economies, and the sectors they operate in, from energy to financial services to telecommunications to technology, are the ones that define whether a modern economy functions at all.

The evidence stretches well beyond Dangote.

Again, United Bank for Africa operates in 20 African countries and serves as the primary banking infrastructure for millions of customers who would otherwise depend on foreign correspondent

banks for cross-border transactions.

Access Holdings and Zenith Bank have similarly expanded across West and Southern Africa, building payment rails and trade finance systems that enable intra-African commerce.

Flutterwave, which recently surpassed the $5 billion valuation mark, processes digital payments for businesses across the continent from a Nigerian engineering base. MTN Nigeria, which invested over N1.6 trillion in network infrastructure in 2025 alone, connects more than 100 million subscribers to voice, data and financial services, and its parent group operates across 16 African markets.

These are not symbolic gestures of Pan-African solidarity. They are capital-intensive operations that create jobs, transfer capability, generate tax revenue, and build the systems other businesses depend on to function. When a Kenyan farmer uses mobile money, when a Ghanaian entrepreneur accesses trade finance, when a Rwandan startup processes a digital payment, the infrastructure that makes it possible is increasingly built and maintained by African

companies.

Policymakers and public commentators across the continent would do well to consider what the alternative looks like. If origin-based hostility or regulatory friction drives African companies out of each other’s markets, the replacement will not be locally owned enterprises that spring up overnight. It will be multinational suppliers from outside the continent, operating on terms that prioritise shareholder returns in London, New York or Beijing over industrial capacity in Nairobi, Lagos or Kigali.

The African Development Bank has repeatedly noted that intra-African investment remains one of the most under leveraged sources of development capital available to the continent, and the pattern of Nigerian companies building across borders is among the clearest demonstrations of what that capital can accomplish when allowed to flow.

Dangote put it plainly at the Lamu ceremony. “Lekki proved that it can be done,” he said of his Nigerian refinery. “Lamu must prove that it can be repeated.” The same logic applies across every sector where African companies are building infrastructure that did not exist before. The continent’s prosperity depends not on where a company’s parent is headquartered but on whether it builds, hires, invests and stays.

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