June 05, (THEWILL) – The founder and President/Chief Executive of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has challenged Nigerians to stop medical tourism and start local production of pharmaceutical drugs needed for the health of the people.
Dangote stated this during a panel discussion at the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers event held in Lagos on Wednesday.
While emphasising the need for every Nigerian, including the rich, to be able to treat themselves in Nigeria when they fall sick, Dangote hinted that it was important to partner with Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation to achieve this.
“What we need to do is to make sure we stop this health tourism, and we should now start producing our own drugs. We should now make sure that when we are sick, we don’t have to travel abroad, all of us, but we need to do a partnership with Bill Gates”, he said.
He recalled that the Dangote Foundation, through partnership with the Gates Foundation, has helped to end Polio in Nigeria and has done quite a lot in improving nutrition.
Demonstrating the potential that Nigeria can be medically independent. Dangote highlighted that the country used to be the second-largest importer of cement in the world, but now it exports more cement than any other African country. He also highlighted how farmers previously struggled to access fertiliser, but now have built the second-largest fertiliser plant in the world.
“So, Nigeria now, not only exports, we actually export 37% of our fertiliser to the United States of America”, he said.
Speaking on petroleum, Dangote maintained that he did what nobody has ever done before by building a 650,000 bpd refinery, revealing that in the month of May 2025 alone, the Dangote Refinery exported 400,000 metric tons of petrol.
According to him, this has ended Nigeria’s dependency on imported petrol, as the country no longer imports the product.
THEWILL reports that the Goalkeepers event, which was hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the first time in Lagos, brought together global leaders, policymakers, and change makers to assess progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs.
Other notable dignitaries at the event included Bill Gates, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, his counterpart in Gombe State, Inuwa Yahaya, among others.
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