Africa’s largest oil refinery is about to become a publicly traded company. Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE, the roughly $20 billion facility built by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, will open what is set to be Nigeria’s largest-ever initial public offering on 14 September, after the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission approved the sale on 4 September. The offer comprises 4.1 billion ordinary shares priced at 525 naira each, and could raise approximately 2.15 trillion naira, roughly $1.6 billion, if fully subscribed.
The refinery itself is already the largest single-train facility on the continent, with a capacity of 650,000 barrels a day. It began producing fuel in 2024 and reached full capacity earlier this year. Dangote has said the IPO proceeds will fund an expansion to 1.4 million barrels a day, effectively more than doubling the plant’s throughput. Nigeria’s state oil firm, NNPC, holds just over 7% of the refinery, with the balance controlled by Dangote’s own group ahead of the listing.
Why the JSE wants a piece of a Lagos listing
What makes this more than a Nigerian business story is the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s own confirmed interest in the deal. Responding to Reuters questions, the JSE said Dangote’s group has “strong intent to hopefully bring the listing to South Africa” once the Nigerian offering is complete, raising the prospect of a secondary listing that would let South African and other investors on the continent’s largest exchange buy into Africa’s biggest refinery without needing access to the Nigerian market directly.
A secondary or dual listing works by letting a company’s shares trade on more than one exchange simultaneously, typically settled and traded in the local listing’s own currency, which removes the currency-conversion and cross-border settlement friction that would otherwise deter many South African institutional investors from buying Nigerian-listed shares directly. For the JSE specifically, landing a listing of this size would be a significant win at a moment when the exchange has been actively working to reverse a long-running decline in the number of companies listed on it, a trend this site has covered in the context of the JSE’s own efforts to simplify listing requirements and attract names like Cell C and Optasia back onto the board.
What it would mean for South African investors and businesses
For a South African fund manager or retail investor, a JSE-listed Dangote refinery would offer direct exposure to a genuinely unusual asset: a single facility large enough to meaningfully affect West African fuel supply, refined-product pricing, and by extension shipping and logistics costs across a chunk of the continent. Diversified exposure to African infrastructure of this scale is not something the JSE currently offers in size, which is likely part of why the exchange is actively courting the listing rather than waiting to be approached.
For South African businesses in the energy and logistics value chain, the more immediate relevance is indirect but real. A refinery expanding toward 1.4 million barrels a day materially changes the supply picture for refined fuel products across the region it serves, and any resulting shift in West African fuel export patterns or pricing can ripple into shipping rates and fuel costs that touch South African import and export logistics, even without a single barrel of Dangote fuel landing directly in a South African port.
The Nigerian offering opening on 14 September is the immediate event to watch. Whether the JSE’s “strong intent” turns into an actual secondary listing depends on how that first offering performs and on commercial terms neither side has yet disclosed, but the exchange’s own public confirmation of talks means this is now a live prospect rather than speculation, and one that would be one of the more significant single listings the JSE has pursued since its recent push to rebuild its own listings count.
