Why Dangote Closed His Tomato Factory

By Osa/ EP

Spain produces 850 000 mT of raw tomatoes yearly. That is 12% of total European production. That is a lot of tomatoes because the Europeans eat lots of tomatoes. Lots of Nigerians work in the tomato farms in Spain.

They have so much tomatoes in Spain that once a year the Spanish will come together and have a very big tomato fight on the street. They will come with truck loads of tomatoes and people can fight each other with it all day. It is tradition and nobody gets hurt. But when you go to Spain just make sure you stay away from the Bull Run. That one also happens every year but don't mix them up.

In Nigeria, many brilliant people thought the problem of tomatoes shortage was there wasn't enough processing power to process the tomatoes produced, and were left to rot. Mr. Aliko Dangote got that information too, so he thought why not build a mega tomato factory to process all that tomatoes?

But he thought lets have a plan B. Lets recruit more farmers to produce tomatoes in case the present capacity was not enough.

As it happened, when the factory was completed the tomatoes available in Nigeria could only run the factory for few weeks and there wasn't enough tomatoes. The country produce too little. Where are all the tomatoes the Minister said were spoiling in Nigeria due to lack of processing power? Stories.

Now Mr. Dangote is stuck with his tomato processing factory and has called in the Italians to come and build and run a very big tomatoes farm in Nigeria so he can run the processing factory.

This is the problem when people believe in fables and live in a fictional reality or lack of deep study of the business.