GABORONE, September 10 — The Botswana Stock Exchange is courting one of Africa’s largest industrial conglomerates for a listing, betting that a single high-profile name can turn a small southern African bourse into a regional capital-raising hub. The target is Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian businessman whose refinery and fertiliser operations anchor one of the continent’s biggest industrial groups. The pitch follows a working visit by Botswana’s Vice President and Finance Minister, Ndaba Gaolathe, to Lagos in April, where he toured the Dangote Refinery and the Dangote Fertiliser Plant.
That trip set the stage for a Capital Markets & Institutional Investors Roundtable in Gaborone, hosted by the BSE and attended by institutional investors, regulators and key state institutions. BSE Chairperson Neo Mooki told the gathering the Botswana market was ready to accommodate the listing, with the necessary regulatory frameworks already in place.
She framed the proposal as part of a larger question about who owns Africa’s economic future. “Mr Dangote — welcome to Botswana,” she said.
A pitch built on ownership, not aid
Mooki noted that in 27 days Botswana turns 60, recalling a country that began with little infrastructure, few graduates, no industry and no stock exchange. Her argument was that Botswana’s transformation had not simply been the result of discovering diamonds, but of securing an ownership stake in the resources beneath its soil. “We did not become wealthy because we found diamonds.
Others found diamonds and remain poor. We became wealthy because we insisted on owning a share of what happened on our own soil.” She used that history to make a broader argument about African capital.
“Africa is not poor. Africa is unmonetised.” For Mooki, the problem is not simply a shortage of resources, but the failure to convert economic value into ownership and wealth. “And value becomes wealth through one mechanism only.
Not aid. Not goodwill.
Capital infrastructure. The unglamorous plumbing that turns a thing you have into a thing you own.” That, she argued, is the role of the BSE. “Why should Africa own so little of what Africa builds?” she asked.
The refinery visit and the bridge to Southern Africa
Mooki’s pitch was informed by the BSE delegation’s visit to the Dangote Refinery in April. “I have been shown many things in this career that were described to me as world-class. That was the first time I have stood inside a picture of audacity. 650 000 barrels a day,” she said.
Dangote, she argued, represents the kind of African industrial ambition the continent needs to finance and own. The proposed listing would give Southern African investors access to such an asset through the region’s own capital-market infrastructure.
“We are not asking to compete with Nigeria. Nigeria’s success is Africa’s success, and the Nigerian Exchange should be, and will be, the home of that listing,” Mooki said. “We are offering to build the bridge — a structure that lets Southern African capital participate in local currency, through local brokers, settled here, with nothing standing between the saver and the asset.” Then came the more direct pitch: “We do not want to be included afterwards.
We want to be there on day one.” President Duma Boko has also backed the broader idea of African capital and entrepreneurship. For Botswana, the attraction goes beyond adding a large company to the domestic bourse.
A Dangote listing would test whether the BSE can turn its ambitions for regional integration into a functioning market capable of connecting Southern African investors with large African companies. It would also give Botswana an opportunity to put its substantial institutional capital to work in a large African industrial business while raising the profile of the country’s capital market.
What to watch next is whether the Dangote group responds to the invitation with a formal listing application, and whether the BSE can convert the roundtable’s momentum into a transaction that Southern African pension funds and brokers can actually access.
