Mark Dekpe
Dangote’s “People’s IPO” widens access to a major African enterprise. Yet national belonging, share ownership, corporate control, and wealth redistribution are not the same. Across Africa and South Asia, large companies are often presented as symbols of national development and economic sovereignty. Their significance will depend on whether public identification becomes durable material participation in the wealth created.
From Tata in India to Alibaba in China and Dangote in Nigeria, the rise of large companies in the Global South has often become inseparable from stories of national development. These businesses are celebrated not only for the wealth they create, but also for showing that societies once positioned mainly as markets or sources of raw materials can build enterprises of global scale. Their factories, platforms, and infrastructure have become symbols of collective possibility.
Tata’s investments in steel, electricity, technical education, aviation, and technology became embedded in India’s nation-building story. Alibaba emerged with China’s digital transformation and framed its platform as a means of enabling small businesses to compete in domestic and global markets. Dangote’s investments in cement, fertilizer, and petroleum refining have similarly come to represent the possibility of African industrialization at scale. In each case, private enterprise became part of a public story about what a nation or region could achieve.
This relationship between companies and citizens is visible across Africa and South Asia. Citizens may identify with large companies as symbols of what their countries can achieve, even when ownership and decision-making remain concentrated among founders, families, institutional investors, or the state. Yet the transformation of corporate success into national achievement raises a difficult question: when citizens are invited to identify with a company as “ours,” how much of it do they actually own? The labor, consumption, public institutions, infrastructure, and aspirations of society may help build the company, while ownership, control, and long-term financial returns remain concentrated.
This article argues that Dangote’s “People’s IPO” may democratize access to investment without necessarily democratizing ownership or corporate control.
Development, Belonging, and the People
African thinkers have long challenged development models that treat people as recipients rather than agents. Claude Ake argued that development must be understood through popular participation and the realities of African societies, not imposed as an external technical project (Ake, 1996). The 2018 UNECA memorial symposium, Africa’s Development Agenda: Lessons from the Adebayo Adedeji Years and Policy Options for the 21st Century, presented Adedeji’s alternative vision as one built on self-reliance, domestic resource mobilisation, productive capacity, infrastructure, mass participation, and a more equitable distribution of the social product (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, 2018). Thandika Mkandawire likewise demonstrated the historical possibility of developmental states on the continent (Mkandawire, 2001).
These perspectives move the discussion beyond the existence of African billionaires or globally competitive firms. They ask whether industrial growth expands productive capacity, collective agency, and social well-being. Development cannot therefore be measured only by investment, employment, or output. It must also ask who participates, who owns, who decides, and who accumulates the resulting wealth.
The same questions apply to South Asia, where companies have long been associated with industrialisation, modernisation, employment, exports, and national pride. The cases of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka differ, but they share a question: does a company’s national importance translate into meaningful public participation in its ownership, governance, and wealth creation?
The Political Power of Belonging
Framing matters. Terms such as national champion, the people’s company, public ownership, shared prosperity, and government of the people create a sense of collective identity. A company can become “our company,” just as a state becomes “our government.” Its success feels shared, criticism can appear disloyal, and support may become an expression of national or continental pride.
This is a form of psychological ownership: people can feel that an institution belongs to them without possessing corresponding legal ownership or decision-making authority. A company may likewise be nationalized in the public imagination without being democratized in its ownership.
Belonging can inspire participation, responsibility, and protection. It can also produce uncritical loyalty. Jason Brennan’s critique of democracy warns that participation does not automatically create informed judgment. Applied cautiously to the IPO, national pride may encourage people to invest without adequately examining valuation, governance, or risk (Brennan, 2016). Participation therefore requires knowledge, transparency, and enforceable rights.
Corporate Responsibility and the State
The relationship becomes more complicated when companies provide roads, schools, clinics, electricity, water, and other essential services. Across the Niger Delta and other resource-producing regions, communities have negotiated with oil companies for services where the state is weak or distrusted. Corporate social responsibility can deliver real benefits, but it can also turn private companies into governing actors at the margins of the state.
A similar concern can arise across South Asia, where corporations may provide education, health care, housing, transport, or digital connectivity. Corporate provision can complement public institutions, but it can also blur the boundary between private generosity and public entitlement, raise company legitimacy, and reduce pressure on government to fulfil its responsibilities.
Sri Lanka offers a familiar context for considering this tension. Companies operating in strategically important sectors such as energy, transport, telecommunications, finance, ports, tourism, and infrastructure can become associated with national development. Yet public dependence on these sectors does not necessarily mean public ownership or control. After the economic crisis, questions about public assets, foreign investment, strategic infrastructure, and accountability have acquired renewed importance. The debate is not simply whether capital is needed, but who controls assets, bears risks, and receives long-term returns.
Whose Wealth?
The central defence of capitalism is that private investment generates innovation, productive capacity, employment, and economic growth. Africa and South Asia need enterprises capable of processing resources, building value chains, and competing internationally. But wealth creation and wealth distribution are separate processes.
Workers receive wages, consumers receive goods, governments may receive taxes, and communities may receive CSR projects. Owners hold claims to dividends, capital appreciation, voting rights, and assets that can pass across generations. Employment can improve income; ownership provides a more direct route to accumulated wealth.
Citizens do not enter investment markets from equal positions. One investor may afford ten shares while another can acquire millions. Both are shareholders, but their capacity to absorb losses, reinvest returns, influence decisions, and build intergenerational wealth is fundamentally different. An IPO should therefore not automatically be described as wealth redistribution. It primarily raises capital and widens access to ownership. It becomes redistributive only when people who previously lacked productive assets acquire and retain a material share of the wealth produced.
This is why privatisation and public listings require scrutiny. Unless pricing, allocation, disclosure, governance, and minority-shareholder protections are carefully designed, formal public access can coexist with concentrated economic power.
Testing the People’s IPO
In September 2026, the Dangote Petroleum Refinery opened an initial public offering presented as “The IPO for the People.” The offer comprises 4.1 billion ordinary shares priced at ₦525 each, with a minimum application of ten shares, or ₦5,250. This low entry point is designed to encourage retail participation in one of Africa’s largest industrial enterprises (Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals, 2026; Securities and Exchange Commission Nigeria, 2026).
The offer can deepen African capital markets, mobilise domestic savings for African industry, and move some citizens from being only workers and consumers to becoming owners. However, reporting indicated that Aliko Dangote would retain about 87 percent of the refinery after the offer (Adetayo, 2026). That does not invalidate the IPO, but the language of “the people” should reflect the quality, not merely the existence, of public participation.
The IPO should be assessed across five dimensions: affordability, breadth of allocation, informed participation, minority-shareholder protection, and durable benefits. Some can be assessed now; others will become clearer only after allocation, listing, and several years of performance. The same five dimensions can be applied to South Asian public listings and privatisations
From National Belonging to Civic Ownership
The real measure of the People’s IPO will be the ownership pattern that remains after several years: how many ordinary investors retain their shares, what returns they receive, whether their rights are protected, and whether participation produces durable household wealth.
Its wider significance extends beyond the shares offered. Ownership should be accompanied by information, accountability, enforceable rights, and a meaningful share of benefits. These expectations can shape how citizens relate to government and encourage them to ask who controls public resources, how decisions are made, and whether national wealth benefits the wider population.
For Global South audiences, the issue is not whether citizens should support successful domestic companies. The issue is whether national pride is used as a substitute for ownership, transparency, and accountability.
The People’s IPO therefore raises a question larger than corporate ownership: can the language of belonging encourage people to participate in African and South Asian enterprise while also demanding accountable government and a fairer share of wealth created through national resources and institutions? The Global South needs more owners, not only more consumers and workers. Civic ownership must also mean citizens who understand the state as theirs and can demand that it fulfil its responsibilities.
Mark Dekpe is a development practitioner and Programme Director at the Initiative for Development Education and Learning in Nigeria. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in international relations from Ahmadu Bello University, and Master’s degree in development studies from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and in public administration from Delta University of Nigeria. His work is shaped by his interests in entrepreneurship, institutional development, and the political economy of the Global South.
Factum is an Asia Pacific-focused think tank/consultancy on Diplomacy, Tech-Plomacy, Digital and Energy Futures accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
