[File image]: Jumoke Oduwole, Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment
There are few sights in Nigeria more haunting than the skeletal remains of the textile mills of Kaduna. Among the weeds and crumbling walls stand factories that once ran three shifts a day, in a city that the whole of West Africa once knew simply as Textile City.
At its height, this was the third largest textile industry in Africa, earning some two billion dollars a year, operating about 167 mills, and employing more than half a million Nigerians directly, second only to the Federal Government itself.
Today, only a handful of those mills still breathe. So when the Senate moved recently to revive the industry by urging a total ban on textile imports, it spoke to a real and urgent national wound. On the goal, rebuilding this industry, restoring its jobs, ending our dependence on foreign cloth, I am in complete agreement.
My disagreement is not about the destination. It is about the road we take to get there.Because we have walked one of these roads before. Several times. And it has led us back, again and again, to those ruins in Kaduna.
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Nigeria is a nation of more than 200 million people, growing at over two percent a year, millions of new wearers of clothes, uniforms and fabric every single year.
Our surviving mills could not clothe a fraction of them. So ask the honest question: if every textile import stopped tomorrow morning, who would clothe the rest of Nigeria? A ban does not answer that question. It does not spin a single new thread or weave a single new metre of cloth. What it creates is a gap, an enormous gap between what Nigerians need and what Nigeria can make, and then it makes filling that gap lawfully a crime. The demand does not vanish. It simply goes underground.
Over roughly three decades, Nigeria has poured the better part of a billion dollars and more into reviving this sector, a Textile Development Fund, a N100 billion Cotton, Textile and Garment Fund, fund after fund under successive administrations,
A ban does not eliminate demand. It hands that demand, tax free, to the smuggler.We know exactly what happens next, because it has happened every time.
Customs officials have uncovered warehouses in Kano packed with smuggled African prints. Restricted goods pour across hundreds of unofficial routes along borders that run for thousands of kilometres, the Benin border alone stretches more than 800.
When we closed our land borders entirely between 2019 and 2022, smuggling did not stop, it simply went dark, while the wider economy paid a heavy price. Studies of the Benin- Nigeria corridor have estimated that unofficial trade runs at several times the value of the official kind.
A ban, in other words, does not protect Nigerian factories. It protects the smuggler’s margin. It turns ordinary traders into criminals, denies the treasury its revenue, and enriches our neighbours’ ports.
And it punishes the very citizens it claims to serve, the tailors, designers and garment makers downstream who suddenly cannot find affordable cloth, and the ordinary buyer who pays more for less.
To understand why a ban alone cannot work, we must be honest about why the mills closed in the first place. They did not close because Nigerians developed a sudden taste for foreign fabric. They closed because making cloth in Nigeria became, quite simply, impossible to do profitably.Start with cotton.
In the 1980s, Nigeria grew more than 300,000 tonnes of it a year. That has since collapsed to a small fraction, and our cotton farmers have scattered. A textile mill without dependable, affordable local lint is a car without fuel.
Then add power: textile manufacturing devours electricity, and with an unreliable grid, our mills were forced onto diesel generators that doubled their costs at a stroke.
No tariff wall can rescue a factory whose electricity costs twice what its competitors pay.
Add to that machinery from the 1960s that could never be replaced, because interest rates of 30 per cent and more made borrowing to retool a fantasy. Add borders that leaked.
And add, most corrosive of all, a government that could never make up its mind, banning imports, then lifting the ban, restricting foreign exchange, then relaxing it, launching intervention funds and then quietly abandoning the policies meant to support them.
Six diseases: cotton, power, machinery, finance, borders, and policy inconsistency. A ban cures not one of them. It treats the fever and ignores the infection.
This is not theory. Over roughly three decades, Nigeria has poured the better part of a billion dollars and more into reviving this sector, a Textile Development Fund, a N100 billion Cotton, Textile and Garment Fund, fund after fund under successive administrations, a foreign exchange ban on textile importers in 2019, the border closure that followed.
The money was largely disbursed. The bans were duly imposed. And the mills stayed shut.
Credit: Daily Trust
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