What built cement, the refinery and, more unevenly, sugar was Nigerian capital willing to take the risk. A $250 million lithium processing facility built by Chinese firms Jiuling and Canmax, operating under Diamond New Energy, opened in Nasarawa State in July, with capacity to process three million metric tonnes of ore a year. Chinese investors alone are estimated to have put around $1.3 billion into Nigerian lithium processing capacity between 2023 and 2025. In all three, dominant Nigerian capital drove execution from year one — the variable was how long that capital took to pay off, not whether it showed up. What is missing is the equivalent of Dangote: a domestic capital allocator prepared to build the next stage of the chain rather than watch it built by others.