14 October 2026
Africa’s richest man is using Botswana’s stock exchange and Access Bank Botswana to bring Southern African investors into his record refinery share sale.
Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote’s oil refinery expects to raise $500 million from Southern African investors through depositary receipts in Botswana, after the region’s stock exchanges picked Gaborone as the single trading venue for their share of his record initial public offering.
Access Bank Botswana, the local unit of a Nigerian-owned lender, will issue the receipts, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Sheperd Aisam, the bank’s managing director, confirmed its role, and Duduetsang Chappelle-Molloy, its head of marketing, said the refinery expects the Botswana receipts to bring in $500 million, according to the report.
If that target is met, Botswana would account for close to a third of the roughly $1.6 billion that Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE is seeking from the sale of 4.1 billion shares at ₦525 each on the Nigerian Exchange. Dangote, Africa’s richest person with a net worth of $51.7 billion according to Forbes, spoke at an event in Gaborone on Wednesday alongside regional exchange officials.
“We have more than reached our target,” he said, according to Bloomberg.
One venue for Southern Africa
The arrangement comes out of the Committee of SADC Stock Exchanges, which groups the bourses of the 16-nation Southern African Development Community. Rather than have each market list the refinery separately, members agreed to route their investors through one exchange.
“We’ve then agreed that one amongst us becomes the host trading venue to reduce any complications,” Collen Tapfumaneyi, the committee’s chairman and chief executive of Zimbabwe’s Financial Securities Exchange, told Bloomberg at the Gaborone event.
The Botswana Stock Exchange first set out the structure in a Sept. 30 announcement. Under that plan, it will act as the central listing and trading venue for the receipts and provide depository, custody and settlement services, while other member exchanges handle distribution and pass orders through from their own markets. Concentrating trading in one place would create a single regional price and spare the company continuing listing obligations on several exchanges, the bourse said. Zimbabwe’s Financial Securities Exchange has been named national coordinator for Zimbabwean investors.
The exchange said at the time that the final structure, the list of participating markets, investor eligibility and subscription procedures would be announced once approvals were secured in Botswana, Nigeria and the other jurisdictions involved. Those details have not yet been published.
“The BSE is engaging with all the relevant parties regarding the Dangote Refinery IPO,” Thapelo Moribame, the exchange’s head of market development, said in written comments to Botswana’s Mmegi newspaper, adding that “details of any participation or distribution arrangements remain subject to the necessary commercial, regulatory” approvals.
Pension money in play
Interest in Botswana has been driven largely by its pension industry. The country’s pension funds held more than 176 billion pula, or nearly $13 billion, at the end of June, Mmegi reported, and fund managers made direct requests to Dangote for access to the offer during an earlier visit to Gaborone.
Mmegi also reported that Standard Bank had been in talks alongside Access Bank to help the exchange offer the receipts. Bloomberg’s report on Wednesday named only Access Bank Botswana as issuer.
Botswana joins Kenya and Ethiopia as markets outside Nigeria where the refinery has arranged access. Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority has approved global depositary receipts trading on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, with up to $300.4 million of the offer set aside for East African investors. In Ethiopia, participation has been limited to a maximum of 100 qualified investors.
Offer extended to Oct. 27
The refinery extended its offer by two weeks to Oct. 27 with approval from Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission, saying it wanted to give more investors across Africa time to take part. The company has not published subscription figures or the split between Nigerian and foreign demand. Dangote has said orders are already several times the amount sought.
The Lekki refinery, which processes about 700,000 barrels a day, reported revenue of $22.5 billion and net profit of $4.73 billion for the first nine months of 2026. Proceeds from the share sale will help fund an expansion to 1.4 million barrels a day by 2029. Dangote and his affiliates own about 80.7% of the refinery, and the offer covers roughly 3% of the company. Shares are expected to begin trading in Lagos in December.
Source: https://shorturl.at/BEPDF
