President/CEO, Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote hosted students, participants and staff of Lagos Business School (LBS) at the Dangote Lekki refinery, recently.
This is the second year in a row that students from LBS will be visiting the Dangote Refinery for an experiential leg of their study programme. Ifeanyi Obiorah, Director, Executive Education LBS stated that the visit to the refinery was an experiential learning experience conducted for the participants of the Owner Manager Programme with the aim of exposing them to unique opportunities that can inspire them to scale their businesses and transform the Nigerian economy.” The purpose of the visit was to give the Owner Manager’s an experiential learning experience by allowing them the opportunity to interact with an inspiring entrepreneur who started a business just like themselves and has greatly contributed to the Nigerian economy and grown his business from a Nigerian brand to a global brand” he said.
Dangote delivered a lecture which stressed the importance of the diversification of the Nigerian economy. He stated that there is a dire need for Nigeria to diversify the economy and focus on other revenue pulling streams other than oil. “It is extremely crucial for us to ensure Nigeria is a diversified economy, we need to invest in other things apart from oil, if we do not invest there will be no growth, what will take us out of recession is growth” he said.
Dangote further stated that Nigeria should focus on agriculture as it is a sure way of boosting the Nigerian economy and attracting foreign exchange and exports. “If I knew one thing now I did not know back then, is the importance of agriculture. Nigeria needs to focus more on agriculture. We do not have food security because a large percentage of our food is imported. Agriculture is very important; the people from rural areas are not concerned about recession, because they are very into agriculture” he said.
The participants present which included the Owner Managers Programme (OMP), the Chief Executive Programme (CEP) and the MBA programme appreciated Alhaji Aliko Dangote for the lecture and engaged him with questions which led to healthy discussions bordering on how to take advantage of the current economic situation of the country which will enable them take their careers and various businesses to the next level.
The visit to the refinery came to a close with a guided tour of the ongoing construction of the Dangote refinery grounds which includes a petrochemical project, gas pipeline project and a fertiliser project.
