Weeks after Rasheed Adewoyin* submitted his CV at the Dangote refinery’s security post, he was offered a job as a scaffolder at the fertiliser plant by an Indian company, Onshore Construction Company Pvt. Ltd (OCCPL), which was in charge of structural engineering, large-scale piping, and heavy equipment erections.

The company offered to pay him ₦75,000 ($60) per month when he assumed the role in May 2019. He recalled that every morning when they resumed work, over 500 employees were mandated to queue as private security personnel, police officers and soldiers screened them before allowing them into the site. Even when they were thirsty, hungry, and had aching muscles, the queue was maintained.

One morning in July 2019, the queue was so long that many people were already tired of standing in the cold. A concerned soldier then ordered the workers to divide the queue into two.

“I was among the first set of people who left the single line to create another one following the instruction,” Adewoyin said. “But the soldier’s colleagues, who did not hear when he gave the instruction, asked us to sit on the floor and started beating us. I was injured with the butt of their guns on my right eye. I wanted to report to the Chief Security Officer (CSO), but the security agents did not allow me.”


He took his grievance to Twitter (the social media platform now known as X).

The public outrage that followed his post got to his employers at OCCPL and the CSO of the refinery, who later apologised on behalf of the undisciplined soldiers. He visited an eye clinic in the Victoria Island area of Lagos the following day and also took three days off to heal properly.

“The CSO returned half of the money I spent on my treatment.”


Rasheed Adewoyin receiving treatment after soldiers securing Dangote Oil Refining Company Limited assaulted and injured him in 2019.
Adewoyin’s case was neither the first nor the last.

Despite being Africa’s largest producer of oil and gas, Nigeria spends billions of dollars annually to import fuel because the four major oil refineries in the country have long been shut down due to poor maintenance. To mitigate the social impacts of sending crude abroad to be refined before shipping it back, the federal government introduced fuel subsidies which made petrol cheap for citizens while the government covered part of the cost of importation. The system would later become a burden as it was exploited and the subsidy became difficult to remove.

When it was obvious that the government was spending the bulk of its revenue to pay fuel subsidies, having a functional refinery became the heart of debates over other policies in Nigeria. Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, stepped in to solve the yearly fuel problems when he announced plans in 2013 to build a local refinery. He also built a multi-billion dollar fertiliser plant in the same compound with the refinery at the Ibeju-Lekki area of Lagos, South West Nigeria — a project that was commissioned in March 2022.

HumAngle investigated cases of gross abuse of rights allegedly perpetrated by security personnel and contractors during the construction of the two projects.

A few days after Nigeria’s ex-president, Muhammadu Buhari, commissioned the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote refinery in 2023, many people took to social media to give accounts of distressing incidents that unfolded at the construction site.

Let's have it

A zoo is a zoo.