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There is a delicious irony in the current Dangote Refinery IPO fever: Nigerians who have never attended a board meeting of Dangote Petroleum Refinery are suddenly behaving like aggrieved shareholders, calculating how much of the refinery belongs to them, joking about their supposed stake and demanding their imaginary dividends. And honestly, beneath the jokes lies a rather serious civic lesson: if Nigerians can suddenly become investors because a private company has offered shares to the public, why can we not behave like investors when government spends the money we are compelled to pay in taxes?
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery public offer opened on 14 September 2026, with 4.1 billion ordinary shares being offered at ₦525 per share, which explains why the jokes have become particularly amusing. Nigerians are asking, sometimes quite hilariously, where their “share” is, what percentage of the refinery belongs to them and when their dividends will arrive. The humour is obvious, but something more profound is hiding underneath it: people become extraordinarily interested in money when they believe that money belongs to them. That same psychology should be transported into governance.
Imagine if every Nigerian began looking at government revenue with the same concern and suspicion with which the Dangote IPO is being examined. Imagine a citizen opening the federal, state, and local government budget and saying, “Wait a minute, what happened to this allocation?” Imagine residents examining their local government’s finances and asking, “How much came in, how much was spent, on what project, and where is the result?” Imagine Nigerians discussing allocations on social media with the same enthusiasm with which they discuss share prices, refinery ownership and imaginary dividends. Suddenly, government would discover that the taxpayer is watching.
Perhaps we have been looking at taxation from the wrong end of the telescope. We have been taught to see ourselves as taxpayers, but perhaps we should also see ourselves as financial stakeholders in the republic. No, paying ₦100,000 in tax does not mean government owes us ₦100,000 plus interest, because taxation is not a private investment contract. But it does mean that public money has been entrusted to public institutions, and those institutions owe the public lawful, transparent and accountable administration of it. The Nigerian Budget Office itself says citizens can monitor the budget by comparing allocations with actual expenditure and completed projects.
The contrast becomes even more striking when one considers how intensely Nigerians scrutinise private investments. Somebody will spend ₦10,000 buying shares and immediately start asking about valuation, prospects, ownership, dividends and risk. Yet the same person may watch millions of naira allocated to a public project disappear into the bureaucratic fog without asking a single question. We demand prospectuses from companies while sometimes accepting promises from governments. When Nigerians ask, “Where is my Dangote share?”, perhaps they should also ask, “Where is my road?”
And this should not be dismissed as mere political agitation. The Office of the Tax Ombud recognises transparency and accountability among taxpayer rights, while the emerging framework around taxpayers’ rights is intended to strengthen fairness, transparency and accountability in the relationship between citizens and revenue authorities. The principle is simple enough for even the most exhausted Nigerian taxpayer to understand: if citizens are expected to contribute to the public purse, they should also cultivate the habit of asking how that purse is being managed. Paying taxes should not require surrendering curiosity.
So, when Nigerians joke about dividends from Dangote Refinery, perhaps the joke should be allowed to mature into a civic habit. When they ask what happened to their imaginary shares, perhaps they should ask what happened to actual public allocations. When they examine a company’s prospectus, perhaps they should also examine government budgets. When they complain that their imaginary refinery investment has not produced returns, perhaps they should remember that the taxes they actually paid were never imaginary. The citizen who asks where public money went is not necessarily an enemy of government; he may simply be taking ownership of his country seriously.
The deepest lesson hidden inside the Dangote IPO memes, therefore, may have very little to do with Dangote at all. It is about ownership. A refinery shareholder will naturally want to know what is happening to his money, while the Nigerian citizen should possess an equally fierce curiosity about the resources entrusted to government. Let us keep the memes, the jokes and the imaginary dividend claims, but let us add something more consequential to them: scrutiny of budgets, allocations, expenditures and projects. If we can behave like shareholders when our money enters a private company, why can we not behave like citizens when our money enters government? Perhaps Nigeria would begin to change the moment taxpayers stopped merely paying for government and started watching what government does with what they paid.
Hashim Yussuf Amao LegalBard is an award-winning young Nigerian writer, serial author, and pan-africanist.
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