Aliko Dangote to buy ships as Nigeria vessel shortage bites

Dangote Industries Limited plans to buy its own cargo ships after failing to find a single vessel to move 1,000 tonnes of cement from Nigeria to Ghana, an executive said, signalling that West Africa’s largest industrial group now sees the region’s shipping gap as a hard limit on its exports.

“We are moving forward towards getting our own ships in order to do this business,” Sada Ladan-Baki, head of international trade export at Dangote Cement, said Tuesday at a Lagos seminar on non-oil exports.

The move matters beyond one company. Nigeria has had no national carrier since the Nigerian National Shipping Line was liquidated in 1995, leaving foreign shippers to collect most of the roughly $6 billion in annual freight earnings from Nigerian trade. If the country’s biggest manufactured-goods exporter must own tonnage to reach a market 400 miles away, the non-oil export push is outrunning its logistics.

Dangote Cement, Africa’s largest cement producer with roughly 50–55 million tonnes of annual capacity, built assembly plants that produced some 7,000 trucks to serve ECOWAS buyers overland. Each border adds tax.

“If we are going to export our cement from here to Ghana, we have to pay Value Added Tax of 18 percent in Benin. We pay in Togo. We pay another 18 percent if we are going to Ivory Coast… the taxes these countries charge us has already made us dead on arrival,” Ladan-Baki said.

Sea freight would bypass that chain — but, he said, “you cannot get a ship that will take your goods from here to Ghana. None.”

Ladan-Baki urged activation of the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund, a roughly $700 million pool created in 2003 to finance Nigerian vessel purchases. NIMASA opened an applications portal in January 2026 offering up to $25 million per operator; seven months later no money has been disbursed.

Dangote already owns terminals at Onne and Apapa and a Lekki jetty serving its $20 billion refinery. BUA Foods, controlled by billionaire Abdul Samad Rabiu, bought two vessels for sugar exports in 2022. No vessel count, budget or timeline has been disclosed.
(Billionaires Africa)