Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man got another accolade as he was ranked 41st among the 50 world’s most influential personalities by Bloomberg.
According to Bloomberg, the list comprises of people that build companies and assemble fortunes. They run banks, or hope to disrupt them. They shape economies and spread ideas. They manage money and wield the clout that goes with the billions of dollars they invest.
The Bloomberg 50 annual Most Influential ranking is in its 5th year. Bloomberg said, ‘in selecting our influential elite, we favor recent accomplishments over lifetime achievements. Half the people here have never appeared on our list before. Tech executives and entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists who fund them are ascendant of late, and the list reflects that. China, for better or worse, is vital to global markets, and we have a bigger Asia cohort than ever.
To build our list each year, we start with a much larger universe of candidates, compiled with the help of Bloomberg News reporters and editors around the world. We also rely on the rankings, profiles, and cover stories we publish throughout the year in Bloomberg Markets. Then the magazine’s editors winnow it down, making the hard calls about who’s in and who’s out’.
This is how Bloomberg describe Dangote: He’s feted like royalty. He has businesses ranging from cement to sugar to energy in a dozen sub-Saharan countries. He’s a fixture at elite gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. No African has ridden the continent’s halting march out of poverty toward potential prosperity as spectacularly as its richest person, the Nigerian industrialist Aliko Dangote.
Dangote’s clout extends beyond the boardroom and the high-flier dinner circuit. In March, as votes were tallied in Nigeria’s presidential election, Dangote, 58, served as an intermediary between the camps of the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, and his ultimately victorious rival, Muhammadu Buhari. “There’s no question that he is quite an exceptional person—not only in Africa but globally,” says Mark Mobius, chairman of the emerging-markets group at Franklin Templeton Investments.
Today, Dangote is seeking to export his business empire and his influence beyond his terror-racked and corruption-riddled home country. Nigeria is responsible for about 85 percent of his fortune, which stood at $13.9 billion as of Sept. 9, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s planning new cement factories across Africa and as far afield as Nepal and Brazil. He’s considering taking Dangote Cement public on the London Stock Exchange and has even floated the idea of buying his beloved Arsenal, a top-ranking soccer club in the English Premier League.
