Dangote named as the only African in Bloomberg's list of world's most 50 influential people

AFRICA'S richest man Alhaji Aliko Dangote has emerged as the only African to make the Bloomberg list of 50 most influential people in the world this year in a new survey that was published yesterday.

Adding a new feature to its portfolio, Bloomberg published The Bloomberg 50 yesterday, that honours 50 icons and innovators who have changed the global business landscape in measurable ways over the past year. It is a new annual, multi-platform initiative representing the most influential thought leaders in business, finance, technology and science, politics and entertainment.

These first Bloomberg 50 honourees were selected by the Bloomberg Businessweek team after months of input from many of  the publishing house's 2,700 journalists and analysts around the globe. It includes executives, entrepreneurs, experts, and entertainers, who al have a quantifiable metric underpinning their inclusion.

Megan Murphy, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, said: “What sets The Bloomberg 50 apart from other lists is that each person chosen has demonstrated measurable change over the past year.  Readers will find many names they recognise but will also discover new visionaries, people who are impacting the world in significant ways and are rapidly gaining the attention they deserve.”

Other prominent honourees on the Bloomberg 50 list include Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. He is a primary proponent of an initiative that would allow women to drive, a decision that is forecast to add $90bn to the economy by 2030.

Other included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Masayoshi Son, Diane Greene and Ken Frazier, the chief executive of Merck, a company with a new innovative drug for advanced lung cancer treatment. Alhaji Dangote who only last week inaugurated his $300m 1.5m tonne capacity cement plant in Congo Brazzaville, has remained top-notch in various global rankings.

Alhaji Dangote said: “I am very delighted with this selection and I see the recognition as a call to do more towards youth empowerment, job creation, better health for the people and economic emancipation of the African continent.”

As of February 2017, Alhaji Dangote, according to Forbes magazine, had an estimated net worth of $12.5bn. He is ranked by Forbes as the 67th richest person in the world and the richest in Africa and peaked on the list as the 23rd richest person in the world in 2014.

Bloomberg, in the preface written by Paul Wallace, said: “The quiet billionaire for his relatively frugal lifestyle, Dangote fast-tracked plans to help his country of 180m people import less of what it eats. Dangote, who made his fortune in the cement industry, is turning his attention to dairy and sugar farming and he’s earmarked $800m to buy 50,000 cattle in the hope of producing 500m litres of milk annually by 2019.

“He’s also racing to finish a 650,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery in Lagos, set to be one of the world’s biggest and says he intends to spend as much as $50bn in the next decade on renewable energy and petrochemical refineries, including investments in the US and Europe. Which is all fine but not quite his grand ambition, buying Arsenal, his favourite soccer team.”