Paper short abstract:

This article scrutinises the Dangote Business Conglomerate in Nigeria to understand factors that drive successful industrial policy Nigeria and factors explaining why success for the company is not necessarily success for development/ or industrialisation.

Paper long abstract:

This article asks which insights can be gained from the Dangote conglomerate both in terms of why pockets of efficiency formed in the Nigerian manufacturing sector and why, at the same time, structural transformation remained limited across the economy as a whole. Mapping Dangote's business activities across sectors and levels of production shows evidence of backward linkages including upscaling across domestic and regional value chains. We review various initiatives of the Nigerian state to support economic diversification and especially manufacturing. We argue that the expansion of, in this case, domestic markets can discipline learning. Yet emerging monopoly capitalism carries with it the fruit of fragile accumulation to the extent that price setting power, tax evasion and control over wages undermines the growth of purchasing power.