Former presidential aide, Reno Omokri has revealed that former President Goodluck Jonathan appealed to Africa’s richest man Aliko, Dangote, to enter the refining and power generation sectors.

Taking to his X page on Wednesday, July 24, 2024, to share his thoughts on the recent battle between Dangote and the Nigerian regulatory authority, Omokri claims Dangote refused Jonathan’s request.

According to the PDP chieftain, Jonathan had promised to support the businessman in the oil business when he intervened in the dispute between Dangote and Cletus Ibeto, the head of Ibeto Group.

Omokri wrote, "The waivers granted by the Jonathan administration to the Dangote Group enabled Nigeria to achieve backward integration in cement production to the extent that we went from being a cement-importing nation to a cement-exporting country.

I was physically present at the Presidential Villa on Friday, 14 October, 2011, when then President Jonathan literally begged Aliko Dangote to go into oil refining and power generation, to which Mr Dangote vehemently refused and said that if he did, Nigerians would accuse him of monopoly.

There had earlier been a shouting match between Mr. Dangote and Mr. Cletus Ibeto, where they accused each other of underhand business dealings, and the atmosphere was tense,

President Jonathan intervened to calm nerves and later appealed to Mr. Dangote to reconsider his stance, stating that the government would help him expand and create jobs for Nigerians. We have video footage of that event.

As a result of the waivers our administration granted to the Dangote Group, they expanded and employed an additional 15,000 Nigerians.

Former President Jonathan was Nigeria's most SME focused leader.

Through the Youth With Innovation in Nigeria (YouWIN) initiative, he gave almost 4000 young Nigerians an average of $50,000 to start Small and Medium Scale businesses. Many got more than $50,000. Please note that these were grants, not loans.

In other words, the Federal Government 'dashed' them the money, to use a local parlance. He not only gave them grants, but our government insisted that they take business courses from consultants hired by the federal government.

YouWIN, according to the World Bank, was the world's most successful government-run business entrepreneurial scheme, which, according to the World Bank, was two and a half times more effective than Mexico’s similar youth job initiative and ten times more effective than Turkey’s own version.

So, it is inaccurate to say that small businesses suffered under the Jonathan administration. Let us look beyond our opinions to data from the World Bank and the National Bureau of Statistics.

Nigeria's economy doubled under Jonathan in 2014 and went from a GDP of $270 to $510 billion, making it the largest economy in Africa, because SMEs were thriving and constituted 11% of our GDP.

Other schemes of the Jonathan era, such as the Nagropreneur, Graduate Internship Scheme and SURE-P, and the e-wallet scheme for farmers, successfully created new SMEs and expanded existing ones.

Flowing from the above, perhaps people can stick to facts when revisiting the past."