Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, has recorded a remarkable $1 billion increase in his estimated fortune within 24 hours, pushing his net worth to $32.5 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaire tracker.

The latest jump came as investors focused on the planned Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Dangote Petroleum Refinery, which is expected to open on September 14, 2026.

Dangote’s Wealth Rises 3.3% in One Day

Forbes’ real-time data showed that Dangote’s estimated fortune rose from about $31.5 billion to $32.5 billion, representing a 3.3 per cent increase.

The figure was based on data recorded on Monday, September 7. His wealth had also increased by about $3.3 million on the previous Friday.

The latest gain means Dangote’s fortune has risen significantly since the end of 2025, when Forbes valued it at approximately $25.6 billion.

It is important to note that the $1 billion figure represents an increase in estimated net worth and should not be interpreted as $1 billion in cash income earned by Dangote in one day.

Bloomberg Puts Dangote’s Wealth Higher

Different billionaire wealth trackers currently give different estimates of Dangote’s fortune because they use different methods for valuing publicly traded and privately held assets.

While Forbes’ real-time tracker placed his wealth at $32.5 billion, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index valued it at about $35.5 billion on Monday.

The difference is largely linked to how the two platforms assess Dangote’s private holdings and other assets.

Dangote Refinery IPO Set to Open September 14

The surge in Dangote’s wealth comes as his massive petroleum refinery prepares for a landmark share offering.

The refinery plans to offer 4.1 billion ordinary shares at N525 per share, potentially raising about N2.15 trillion, or roughly $1.6 billion, if fully subscribed.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved the offering and registered the refinery’s existing 120.13 billion shares, putting the company on course for what is expected to become Africa’s largest IPO.

The offer is scheduled to run from September 14 to October 13, 2026, according to details reported by Reuters.

Refinery Valuation Put at About $47 Billion

The registration of the refinery’s existing shares implies an equity valuation of roughly $47 billion, based on Reuters’ calculations.

The company plans to use funds from the IPO to support expansion and increase the refinery’s processing capacity from about 700,000 barrels per day to 1.4 million barrels per day.

Reuters reports that the refinery has also unveiled a broader $14.3 billion expansion programme, with completion targeted for 2029.

Why the IPO Matters to Dangote’s Wealth

The public offering could provide investors with a clearer market-based valuation for one of the biggest assets in Dangote’s business empire.

The refinery, which began operations in 2024, has become a major player in Nigeria’s petroleum industry and has expanded its reach into international markets.

Dangote has also expressed plans to attract investors from across Africa, describing the planned listing as an opportunity that goes beyond Nigeria.

With the IPO approaching, investor interest in the refinery has added another layer of attention to Dangote’s already substantial fortune.

Dangote Remains Africa’s Richest Man

The latest figures further strengthen Dangote’s position as Africa’s wealthiest individual.

Earlier in 2026, his fortune had already climbed substantially. Billionaires Africa reported in March that Bloomberg had valued Dangote at $32.5 billion, making him the 64th-richest person globally at the time.

His latest reported wealth increase comes at a significant moment for the Dangote Group, with the refinery IPO expected to attract major attention from Nigerian and international investors.

The line has been crossed. Not metaphorically, not as a warning, but as a scientific and institutional fact now acknowledged by the United Nations itself. The United Nations Environment Programme has confirmed in a new report that humanity is certain to exceed the 1.5°C warming limit set by the Paris Agreement the legally binding global treaty that has anchored the world’s climate ambitions for over a decade. And in doing so, UNEP has done something it has never done before: it has moved the language from “unlikely” to “impossible,” stripping away the diplomatic cushioning and delivering the verdict that climate scientists have long feared would eventually have to be spoken plainly.

This is the first time that UNEP has referred to staying beneath the 1.5°C warming limit as impossible rather than unlikely. The executive director of UNEP, Inger Andersen, put it with the kind of bluntness that the moment demands, writing in the report’s foreword that the 1.5°C goal must now be approached from above, meaning that the world will overshoot the threshold and then attempt to work its way back down. It is a sentence that belongs in the vocabulary of damage control, not prevention. The era of preventing the worst has quietly ended. The era of managing it has begun.

The report was not entirely without precedent in the scientific community. In February 2025, a pair of studies published in Nature Climate Change determined that Earth had likely already entered the 20-year period in which global temperatures would exceed 1.5°C. What UNEP has now done is translate that scientific assessment into institutional policy language, the kind that governments, economies, and international bodies are compelled to respond to with plans rather than pledges.

The pathway UNEP is now prescribing is called “overshoot, peak and decline.” To reduce severe threats to human health, food security, water supplies, and more, societies will need to reach net-negative greenhouse gas emissions by not only cutting those emissions, but expanding carbon dioxide removal projects. This means conventional approaches such as reforestation and ecosystem restoration, as well as newer and currently limited technologies such as carbon capture and storage machines and systems that pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and lock it underground. The report described this pathway plainly: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.”

The scale of what is being asked of the world is staggering. Technologies that remove carbon from the air and store it underground are still limited in scale, and so far, just 12 projects have been successful. To even limit warming to 1.5°C without overshooting a scenario now off the table, the world would need to deploy carbon dioxide removal technologies at rates faster than those seen for solar power, which is far from the current reality. The gap between where the world is and where it needs to be is not a gap that inspires optimism. It is one that demands urgency on a scale that no generation has yet managed to sustain.

There are also hard physical limits to what the planet can absorb even with the best technology humanity can deploy. Scientists aren’t sure Earth’s subsurface could even store the amount of carbon necessary to keep Earth at net-zero emissions, with the report warning that just maintaining net-zero CO₂ emissions could exhaust current estimated storage capacity in sedimentary basins by 2200. And practical obstacles abound large amounts of land would need to be reforested for conventional carbon removal, which could spark conflicts with agriculture, while wildfires, as well as climate change itself, could prevent or damage plant growth.

In order to bring global temperatures back to the 1.5°C mark, Earth’s warming must not exceed 1.8°C. Beyond that mark, cooling Earth back to the 1.5°C level this century becomes increasingly challenging. Without urgent action, the breaching of dangerous tipping points in Earth systems, such as irreversible changes to ice sheets or the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will become more likely, paired with growing human and ecological suffering.

“We need stronger political will,” Andersen wrote. “Decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine whether viable options remain to reverse warming towards 1.5°C.”

For Nigeria and the broader African continent, regions that have contributed the least to global carbon emissions historically but stand to suffer the most acutely from rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, coastal flooding, and agricultural collapse, this report is not an abstraction. It is a forecast of the conditions under which millions will try to farm, find water, build cities, and survive. The 1.5°C target was never just a number. It was a promise that the world made to its most vulnerable people. That promise, the UN has now confirmed, has been broken. What happens next depends entirely on whether the world can find, in the wreckage of that broken promise, the will to do what it failed to do when doing so was still the easier option.

The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, has accused Kwara State Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq of creating the political crisis rocking the state and attempting to blame him for its fallout.

Wike said AbdulRazaq pushed three senators and several members of the House of Representatives out of the All Progressives Congress (APC) political arrangement, only to accuse him of sponsoring them after some found accommodation in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

“He has been the one championing this campaign against me everywhere. I mean the Kwara State Governor, AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, and I have confronted him about it,” Wike said.

“You removed three senators; you removed members of the House of Representatives. You must be a super governor to survive that.

“Strategically, if you try to remove all these people, you have a crisis in your hands, and you have to be very, very careful.”

The crisis took a dramatic turn with the defection of Kwara Central Senator Saliu Mustapha from the APC to the PDP, where he subsequently emerged as the party’s senatorial candidate.

Mustapha’s defection, alongside the exit of other prominent APC figures, has rattled the political establishment in Kwara and significantly altered calculations ahead of the 2027 elections.

Wike questioned what AbdulRazaq expected the displaced politicians to do after shutting them out of the APC, saying they could have joined the ADC or NDC, where their support for President Bola Tinubu could not be guaranteed.

“These senators you removed, you have no place for them. Therefore, did you prefer them to go to ADC or to go to NDC, which is opposing Mr President fervently?” he asked.

Wike said rather than appreciate that the politicians joined a PDP tendency still supporting Tinubu, AbdulRazaq had resorted to portraying him as the mastermind of opposition against his government.

“The Governor of Kwara State now takes this propaganda to their own level, saying that Wike is now sponsoring a candidate in Kwara because I am supporting Saraki,” he said.

Wike dismissed the allegation, insisting that his support for Tinubu did not mean the PDP would stop fielding candidates against the APC.

“Did I have any agreement that now that we are supporting Mr President, PDP will not have any candidate anywhere?” he asked.