The Guardian crowns Aliko Dangote as PERSON OF THE YEAR 2025

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The Guardian newspaper has named Aliko Dangote as its Person of the Year for 2025, recognising his impact on business, industry, and economic development in Africa.

The award highlights Dangote’s leadership of the Dangote Group, whose portfolio spans cement, sugar, salt, flour, and refining — including the continent’s largest oil refinery in Lagos, among other strategic investments.

This honour acknowledges his role in job creation, infrastructure development, and positioning Africa within global markets through industrialisation and strategic entrepreneurship.

Anointing Aliko Dangote as Person of the Year feels like more than a gesture of business acumen; it feels like a quiet acknowledgement of endurance in a landscape that rarely rewards patience. Dangote’s journey — from early entrepreneurial beginnings to becoming Africa’s richest man and a central figure in continental industry — mirrors a larger story about ambition rooted in origin, not origin abandoned. This award does not merely celebrate wealth; it honours a persistent shaping of ecosystems, a willingness to build complex institutions in environments where infrastructure, expectations, and resources often challenge persistence itself.

In a season where global headlines tend to celebrate flash and novelty, this recognition invites us into a subtler conversation: what is it that sustains influence long after the first headline fades? In Dangote’s story, longevity speaks not just to success, but to a kind of quiet constancy — of showing up, of reinvesting presence into community, of seeing possibility where others see uncertainty. And perhaps the lingering question beneath that crown is this: when we measure a life’s significance, do we value the disruption it caused, or the lives it steadied along the way?

When you think about leadership that lasts — not just wins — what qualities do you see repeated, and why do they matter beyond the moment itself? 

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