Cameroon Blocks Allocation of Land to Nigeria’s Dangote Cement

Land in Cameroon’s port city of Douala allocated to Nigeria’s Dangote Cement Plc  to build a manufacturing plant belongs to the municipality and a cultural group and can’t be given out, a government official said.

Members of the ethnic Douala and Sawa groups resolved to not hand over the land for any reason, Government Delegate to the Douala City Council Fritz Ntone Ntone said in a statement handed to reporters yesterday in Yaounde, the capital. The 2,000-square-meter (21,528-square-feet) area of land near the shore of the Wouri River has been leased to Dangote Cement for 30 years.

Cameroon’s government signed an agreement with Dangote last year authorizing the company to build a 55 billion-CFA-franc ($109 million) cement plant in Douala with the capacity to produce 1 million metric tons of the building material annually.

Cameroonian Prime Minister Philemon Yang “assured the Dangote Group that the government of Cameroon is keen on getting the group to stay in the country,” Anthony Chiejina, a spokesman for Dangote, said in a phone interview today from Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. “It is a big opportunity they cannot afford to miss.”