Africa’s Richest Person Wants to Dominate Oil Refining, Too

To reach Africa’s largest oil refinery, you must drive along a new six-lane highway that snakes its way through the swampland of Nigeria’s Atlantic shoreline. The desolate landscape underscores the difficulty of building anything this ambitious 50 miles from the center of Lagos, the country’s central metropolis. At night, from a distance, only a single flare burning off gas from the plant offers any hint of a vast, and consequential, industrial complex.

The refinery operates as a kind of city-state. It has its own jetty and breakwater to ensure the safe delivery of high-tech equipment, as well as a ...