By NaijaToday Business Desk | June 21, 2026

There is an economy running inside Nigeria that does not appear in the federal government's official projections, does not benefit from the Central Bank's intervention programmes, and does not wait for the National Assembly to pass enabling legislation.

When the Dangote Petroleum Refinery finally began processing crude oil at meaningful scale, the reaction from Nigerians was a mixture of pride, relief, and cautious expectation. Here, at last, was the thing that was supposed to change everything — a 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery sitting on the edge of the Lagos lagoon, the largest single-train refinery in the world, built by a Nigerian for Nigeria.