By Chris Takudzwa Muronzi
HARARE (Reuters) -Nigeria’s Dangote Group will invest at least $1 billion in a pipeline, power generation and cement plant in Zimbabwe, its founder and CEO Aliko Dangote said on Wednesday.
Dangote, Africa’s richest man, met Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa and signed an investment agreement with the government on Wednesday morning.
“We have just signed an agreement between Zimbabwe and the Dangote Group to do various investments in various sectors some of which are of course cement, power generation and a pipeline to bring petroleum products,” Dangote told reporters in Harare.
He said the pipeline would complement the Dangote Group’s plans to establish the biggest oil refinery in the world.
The industrialist previously visited Zimbabwe in 2015, then under the late President Robert Mugabe who was replaced by Mnangagwa after a 2017 coup, but abandoned plans to invest in the southern African country for unclear reasons.
Asked what had changed, Dangote said: “There are quite a lot of changes between that time when we came and now. The government is solid, there is a lot of transparency.”
The Dangote Group has operations in 17 African countries and one of its subsidiaries, Dangote Cement, is a leading cement manufacturer on the continent.
(Reporting by Chris Takudzwa Muronzi, editing by Nelson Banya and and Bill Berkrot)
