The groundbreaking ceremony for Dangote’s East Africa Oil Refinery in Lamu is taking place today, September 30, with President William Ruto presiding alongside Aliko Dangote himself. Deputy President Kithure Kindiki and Interior CS Kipchumba Murkomen both arrived in Lamu ahead of the event, and according to Kenyan reports the Daily Nation says as many as 14 other African heads of state are expected to attend — turning what could have been a routine construction milestone into a major regional diplomatic moment.
The scale is significant: a planned 700,000-barrel-per-day facility priced around Ksh2.2 trillion (roughly $16–20 billion depending on the source), positioning it as the second-largest refining complex in Africa after Dangote’s own Lagos plant. It sits within the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor special economic zone and arrives more than a decade after Kenya’s last refinery, the Changamwe plant in Mombasa, shut down in 2013 due to ageing infrastructure. Beyond fuel, the wider plan includes petrochemicals and roughly 1,000MW of power generation — Dangote says around 500MW of that could potentially be supplied back to the surrounding region. Construction is expected to take about three years, targeting completion around 2030.
On the land dispute we covered yesterday: it hasn’t derailed anything. Dangote himself dismissed the court order as “normal for us in Africa,” and the court’s status-quo order didn’t stop the ceremony — it only preserves conditions on the specific disputed plot while the underlying compensation case proceeds toward its October 14 hearing. Everyone involved — government, Dangote Industries, and the 133 Chandavai residents who filed the case — is treating today’s ceremony and that legal fight as two separate tracks running in parallel, not a collision.