Aliko Dangote rang the bell at the Lagos exchange this month, and the headlines called it history. Africa’s biggest IPO. A “people’s” offering. Ten million shareholders, they promise. But strip away the ceremony and ask the only question that matters under capitalism: who profits, and who pays?

The Dangote Refinery was sold as liberation – the end of importing fuel at gunpoint prices, a homegrown giant finally refining what Nigeria itself pumps from the ground. Imports have indeed fallen. But liberation from foreign oil majors that merely replaces them with a single domestic monopolist is not liberation. It is a change of landlord.

Consider the structure. One refinery. One owner. A $20 billion facility processing 700,000 barrels a day, on track to become the largest on earth, sits under the control of one man and his conglomerate. NNPC, the state oil company supposedly representing the Nigerian public, was offered a bigger stake and refused. The state was pushed to the margins of its own country’s fuel supply so that private equity could be courted instead.

Now comes the IPO, and this is the sleight of hand every socialist should recognize instantly: only a sliver of the company, a stake in the single digits is being sold to the public. The commanding heights remain untouched. Ordinary people are invited to buy a few shares in the spectacle while the billionaire keeps the throne. This isn’t democratization of ownership. It’s democratization of risk, dressed up as democratization of wealth. If fortunes turn, retail investors absorb the shock. If it thrives, capital concentration deepens.

And what has this monopoly meant for the price at the pump? We were told domestic refining would finally break dependence on volatile imports. Yet subsidy removal combined with a single dominant refiner has left millions facing petrol prices that swallow entire wages. A monopoly does not need to conspire to gouge; the absence of rivals does the work. This is textbook capitalism: capital concentrates, then extracts.

Here lies the core of the myth. We are told that private industrial triumph is national triumph, that one billionaire’s balance sheet stands in for the people’s welfare. But class interests are not identical. The refinery worker, the commercial driver, the market woman paying more for transport, their stake in “country self-reliance” is not the same as Dangotes. A nation is not liberated from foreign extraction when it is merely handed over to a domestic extractor with better PR.

Real energy sovereignty would mean public ownership, transparent pricing, and worker and community control over a resource that constitutionally belongs to the people. Anything less is not the people’s IPO. It is the people’s illusion.