Alhaji Aliko Dangote, President, Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), Aliko Dangote, has assured small-scale investors eager to own equities through his refinery’s Initial Public Offering ((IPO) that they would be prioritised in the allocation of shares.

He delivered his message in Hausa during an interview with Abis Fulani, which was translated by Google Gemini, while discussing the planned IPO and its potential benefits to investors.

The interview was published on Thursday but gained traction on Saturday.

According to Dangote, retail investors seeking to buy shares worth N50,000, N100,000 and other smaller amounts would receive priority over large institutional investors.

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He said, “When you do something like this—what is called an IPO—all the small-scale investors are the ones who will be given priority first.

“The big institutional investors who request large allocations will not get everything they ask for. But the small retail investors who want to buy N50,000 worth, or some buying N100,000 worth, and so on, they are the ones who will be given priority allocations.”

He said the remaining shares would subsequently be distributed among investors.

On the potential value of the shares, Dangote said the current N525 price could increase substantially, projecting that it could eventually reach N10,000.

He said, “As I was saying, this share, if you look at it, we are currently at N525. A day will come when this share will reach N10,000.

“Therefore, if you hold it, having bought it, and it rises to N10,000, where you previously invested N5m, it will now be worth over N50m. You see, you have become wealthy.”

Dangote further said shareholders could choose to receive dividends in either naira or dollars, saying the option could help investors cope with currency depreciation.

He said the dollar option would be particularly useful to Nigerians with financial obligations abroad, including parents with children studying in the United Kingdom.

Dangote said, “The benefit of buying it is that holding this share will not prevent you from carrying out your regular work. You hold this share, and when dividends are paid, you won’t need to fear currency devaluation.

“That is because you can choose to receive your dividend in Naira or in Dollars. If you have a child studying at a school in England, for example, even if there is economic instability or currency devaluation—may God protect us—having this means what you receive is in Dollars.”

He recalled the sharp depreciation of the naira against the dollar, saying the exchange rate had risen from about N400 to the dollar to N1,800.

“So your child won’t have to… avoid exchange rate shocks, like when rates moved from N400 up to N1,800.

“Most children were brought back home as a result. So what we want to prevent is that kind of situation,” he said.

The Dangote Refinery IPO comprises 4.1 billion ordinary shares priced at N525 each. A full subscription is expected to raise about N2.15tn, while the minimum subscription is 10 shares, costing N5,250. The offer is scheduled to run from September 14 to October 13, 2026.

After the offer closes, applications will be processed and investors will be informed of their allotments. Applying for a particular number of shares does not guarantee that an investor will receive the full amount requested, particularly if the offer is oversubscribed.

The shares are expected to be listed on the Nigerian Exchange Main Board after the allotment process, after which their market price will be determined by demand and supply.

While Dangote projected that the shares could eventually reach N10,000, the N525 offer price does not guarantee a future market price or return.

The share price could rise or fall after listing depending on the company’s performance, investor sentiment, refining margins, demand and broader economic conditions.

The IPO proceeds are expected to support the refinery’s expansion, with the company planning to increase its refining capacity from about 650,000–700,000 barrels per day to 1.4 million barrels per day.

FIRST Exploration & Petroleum Development Company Limited and the NNPC Limited/FIRST E&P Joint Venture, in partnership with the Health Emergency Initiative, have trained over 100 secondary school students and teachers from public schools in Bayelsa State on first aid, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and other emergency response skills.

The two-day training, held in Yenagoa, was aimed at equipping the participants with basic lifesaving skills to provide immediate assistance to victims of emergencies before the arrival of professional medical help.

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Speaking during the programme, the Executive Director and founder of HEI, Paschal Achunine, said the initiative was designed to change the attitude of bystanders who often resort to recording emergencies on social media instead of taking steps to save lives.

Achunine said the programme had been implemented in several states, adding that participants were expected to transfer the knowledge acquired to other students and members of their communities.

“Our expectation is that as opposed to the current practice, where people take pictures and videos and put it on social media when an emergency happens, we’ll see more proactive response, a robust response from young people,” he said.

He said the participants were trained in basic first aid, CPR and other pre-hospital emergency skills, adding that timely intervention could improve the survival chances of accident victims and people suffering cardiovascular emergencies.

“We’ve seen a lot of high-profile people, young persons, adults, who slumped, and some were in their office, some were on the road, and people around were pouring water, doing nothing positive to save or to offer them CPR. So this is to change that story,” Achunine said.

The HEI founder noted that road traffic crashes accounted for a significant number of deaths among young people, stressing that equipping students with emergency response skills could help reduce preventable deaths.

He also disclosed that more than 30 per cent of deaths in Nigeria occurred during the pre-hospital stage, describing the training as a proactive intervention to address the challenge.

According to him, HEI had operated a post-crash care programme since 2017 in partnership with organisations, including the Federal Road Safety Corps and hospitals, providing up to N100,000 deposit support for critically injured crash victims taken to hospitals.

He said the first responder training would complement the post-crash intervention by ensuring that appropriate lifesaving measures were taken before victims reached medical facilities.

“This is a further sweetener to ensure that not only when people are critical, but at the early phase of that pre-hospital emergency, more lives can be saved,” he said.

Achunine further disclosed that HEI had partnered with the Nigeria Educational Research and Development Council to integrate emergency health education into the school curriculum.

He said approval had been obtained from the relevant authorities to introduce the programme into composite subjects in primary and secondary schools.

“In the coming months, in the new academic year, we’ll start seeing emergency health education, which is a more robust version of this training conducted in parts and conducted with practical applications in secondary and primary schools,” he said.

Also speaking, the Executive Director, Corporate Services, FIRST E&P, Emmanuel Etomi, said the company supported the initiative because timely intervention during emergencies could determine whether a victim survived.

“During a medical emergency, road traffic accident, cardiac arrest, or other life-threatening incident, the difference between life and death can be measured in minutes,” Etomi said.

He said there was a need to ensure that people in communities knew what to do before professional help arrived, adding that the trained students and teachers could serve as first points of assistance during emergencies in schools, homes and communities.

Etomi described the training as an investment in community resilience, saying the knowledge acquired could turn helplessness into informed action and potentially save lives.

He also disclosed that HEI was among the five inaugural beneficiaries of Impact FIRST: Heritage, a multi-year funding programme launched by the NNPC Limited/FIRST E&P Joint Venture to support organisations with proven impact and sustainable delivery models.

Etomi commended the Bayelsa State Government and HEI for bringing the programme to the state, expressing optimism that the partnership would help deepen and expand its impact.

For years, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has been at the centre of Nigeria’s battle against fake, substandard and unsafe medicines and other regulated products.

But has the agency truly changed since Professor Mojisola Adeyeye became Director-General in 2017?

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For those who might want to respond in the affirmative, it is important to note that the transformation did not begin with Adeyeye, and they must factor in what previous leadership achieved before judging the current administration.

Before Adeyeye: The Orhii Years

Before Adeyeye, the NAFDAC was led by Dr Paul Orhii, who became Director-General in 2009 and remained in office until February 2016.

Orhii’s tenure was strongly associated with the use of technology in the fight against counterfeit medicines, as the NAFDAC introduced and expanded mobile authentication systems and other technologies designed to allow consumers to verify medicines.

By 2015, the NAFDAC reported that it had confiscated and destroyed counterfeit drugs worth more than N27 billion over five years. The agency also reported that more than 80 million Nigerians could use authentication technology to verify the genuineness of certain products.

There was also measurable evidence of progress against counterfeit medicines.

A survey cited by Devex found that the prevalence of counterfeit antimalarial medicines fell from 19.6 percent in 2012 to 3.5 percent in 2015, with the NAFDAC attributing the improvement partly to authentication technology and other enforcement strategies, including the use of TruScan at ports.

The NAFDAC was also actively arresting counterfeiters and seizing fake medicines. In 2015, for example, the agency announced the seizure of more than 15 containers of counterfeit pharmaceuticals valued at about N1 billion from warehouses linked to a suspected counterfeit-drug kingpin.

However, Orhii’s tenure was not without controversy. His administration faced allegations concerning financial management, which he denied. He was removed from office in February 2016.

2016–2017: Yetunde Oni’s Transitional Period

After Orhii’s removal, Mrs Yetunde Oni, then a senior official of the NAFDAC, became Acting Director-General in February 2016.

Her approximately 18-month tenure is important because it is sometimes overlooked when comparing the NAFDAC before and after Adeyeye.

In 2016–2017, Oni’s administration reported progress in several areas, including the retooling of the NAFDAC’s laboratories, laboratory accreditation, improvement of registration procedures and measures to support small and medium-sized businesses.

In a July 2017 management report, Oni listed updated guidelines, revised permit processes, user-acceptance testing of electronic processes, new job descriptions for officers and the creation of additional outstations among the achievements recorded during her tenure.

The Federal Ministry of Information also reported in December 2016 that the NAFDAC, under Oni, had instituted 52 cases and secured eight convictions since February of that year.

Another contemporary account credited her administration with laboratory retooling, accreditation of the Agulu and Kaduna laboratories, improvements in marketing-authorisation procedures and a 50 percent reduction in registration costs for products under the MSME clinic.

So, the historical record does not support the argument that the NAFDAC was in any way stagnant before Adeyeye.

September–November 2017: Ademola Magbojuri

When Oni retired after reaching the mandatory retirement age in September 2017, Mr Ademola Andrew Magbojuri became Acting Director-General.

His tenure was brief — lasting only weeks — before Adeyeye was appointed.

Magbojuri had previously served as a senior director within the NAFDAC, including roles involving finance, planning, research and statistics, and the agency’s Training and Research Institute.

Because he served only as a transitional acting DG, there is little basis for attributing major long-term institutional achievements specifically to his short period at the top.

His importance in this history is that he was the person Adeyeye directly succeeded in November 2017.

Then Came Mojisola Adeyeye — 2017

Professor Mojisola Adeyeye assumed office in November 2017.

According to Adeyeye’s account, she inherited a NAFDAC facing serious financial and operational problems, including about N3.2 billion in debt, with significant amounts owed in taxes, staff-related expenses and contractor obligations. She also said that roughly 70–80 percent of the agency’s equipment was non-functional.

These figures are Adeyeye’s account of the condition she inherited and should therefore be treated as claims by the DG rather than an independently audited assessment.

But unlike simply measuring the NAFDAC by the number of counterfeit products seized, Adeyeye’s administration increasingly focused on institutional regulatory capacity and international standards.

2018–2019: The Beginning of a New Regulatory Push

Adeyeye’s administration pursued quality-management and regulatory reforms, including efforts to align the NAFDAC with the World Health Organization’s Global Benchmarking Tool.

Going by the NAFDAC’s own records, the achievements since November 2017 included laboratory upgrading, quality-management systems, ISO 9001 certification and digitalisation of regulatory processes.

The administration also worked on reducing the time required to register regulated products. Nigeria’s National Development Plan also recorded that NAFDAC had re-engineered registration processes and reduced processing time from almost a year to less than three months.

2022: The Biggest International Milestone

The most significant evidence of institutional change came in March 2022.

After a formal assessment by international experts using WHO’s Global Benchmarking Tool, Nigeria’s medicines regulator achieved WHO Maturity Level 3.

The WHO explained that the assessment examined more than 260 indicators covering areas such as product authorisation, laboratory testing, market surveillance and the ability to detect adverse events.

According to the WHO, Nigeria had reached ML3, meaning its regulatory system had demonstrated that it functioned well when measured against most of the international indicators.

This was a major achievement because it was not simply the NAFDAC declaring itself successful. The assessment was conducted through the WHO benchmarking process.

2023: Further Laboratory Progress

The improvement continued after the 2022 milestone.

According to the WHO Africa report, NAFDAC subsequently achieved prequalification of its Central Drug Control Laboratory in September 2023.

That provided further evidence that the improvements were extending beyond administrative reforms into laboratory and technical capacity.

2025: NAFDAC Maintains Its International Standing

Another important test came in 2025.

The NAFDAC retained its WHO Maturity Level 3 status following a new benchmarking exercise. That matters because achieving a regulatory standard once is different from maintaining it.

The 2025 result therefore provided evidence that the improvements recognised in 2022 had not simply disappeared after the original assessment.

The agency also achieved another major international milestone in 2025 by becoming a full member of the International Council for Harmonisation (ICH), strengthening Nigeria’s participation in international pharmaceutical regulatory standards.

But Has NAFDAC Defeated Fake Drugs?

This is where the analysis needs to be balanced, because the response would be in the negative.

The NAFDAC’s institutional transformation should not be confused with the elimination of counterfeit and substandard products from Nigeria.

Fake and substandard medicines still enter markets while the NAFDAC continues to conduct seizures, recalls, laboratory testing and enforcement operations.

In the same vein, that does not necessarily mean the reforms failed.

In fact, one indication of a stronger regulator can be its ability to detect, investigate and recall dangerous products more effectively.

The real question is whether those stronger systems are translating into safer products for Nigerians.

The Real Comparison

The evidence therefore shows three different phases.

Paul Orhii — 2009–2016

Focused heavily on modernising the NAFDAC’s anti-counterfeit campaign through technology, authentication systems, enforcement and seizures. The reported reduction in counterfeit antimalarial medicines between 2012 and 2015 is evidence of measurable progress during this period.

Yetunde Oni — 2016–2017

Maintained enforcement while concentrating on laboratory retooling, accreditation, registration reforms, MSME support and internal administrative improvements. Her administration also reported 52 cases and eight convictions during the period from February to December 2016.

Ademola Magbojuri — September–November 2017

Served as a short transitional Acting DG before Adeyeye’s appointment.

Mojisola Adeyeye — 2017–present

Moved the emphasis strongly toward institutional strengthening, quality-management systems, digitalisation and international regulatory benchmarking, culminating in WHO ML3 in 2022, retention of ML3 in 2025, and full ICH membership in 2025.

Verdict

The evidence suggests that the NAFDAC has genuinely transformed, but the change should be understood as an evolution rather than a complete reinvention.

Orhii’s administration helped establish technology-driven anti-counterfeit measures. Oni’s short tenure continued enforcement and strengthened laboratories and administrative processes. Magbojuri provided a brief transition.

Adeyeye then took the institution further toward internationally benchmarked regulatory standards, with the strongest independent evidence being the WHO’s recognition of Nigeria at Maturity Level 3 in 2022 and the subsequent retention of that status in 2025.

So the fairest conclusion is:

The NAFDAC was not a useless agency before Adeyeye, and Adeyeye did not eliminate the problem of fake drugs.

But under her leadership, there is strong evidence that the regulator itself became more internationally mature, structured and technically capable.

The realistic goal is not to pretend counterfeit drugs can be eliminated completely, but to keep the problem under tighter control, making detection faster, enforcement stronger, and illegal production, importation and distribution increasingly difficult.

Ultimately, the real measure of this progress is whether these stronger systems continue to protect Nigerians and make the counterfeit-drug trade harder to sustain, regardless of who leads NAFDAC next.