The Federal Government and the Kaduna State Government have unveiled a new roadmap aimed at reviving Nigeria’s textile and garment industry, a sector whose collapse across the north was traced last week to decades of mismanagement, policy failures and neglect that shut down at least 51 industries, including more than 20 textile firms.
The roadmap, unveiled over the weekend at a stakeholders’ engagement on the National Cotton, Textile and Garment Industrial Transformation Programme in Kaduna, targets the restoration of abandoned facilities, including Kaduna’s Kakuri textile hub, and the repositioning of the industry for sustainable growth, according to the Special Adviser on Cotton, Textile and Garments at the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, Mrs Eme Bassey.
Bassey said the 2015 textile policy is being reviewed to introduce fresh fiscal, financial, regulatory and skills development incentives designed to attract domestic and foreign investment across the value chain.
She said the transformation programme would roll out in four phases, beginning with the policy reforms currently underway, before moving to expand production, infrastructure, institutional capacity and financing.
The announcement comes barely two weeks after an investigation by THE WHISTLER, drawing on interviews with former workers, labour leaders, manufacturers and Bureau of Public Enterprises records, found that the textile sector accounted for more than 20 of the 51 northern industries that have shut down over the past three decades.
The investigation traced the decline to a combination of currency devaluation, unreliable electricity that forced manufacturers onto costly diesel generators, and competition from smuggled imports, which the World Bank estimated at about $2.2bn entering Nigeria annually through Benin Republic, against local textile production valued at roughly $40m.
Among the casualties documented in that investigation was Kano’s Challawa Industrial Estate, once home to factories running three shifts daily and now largely abandoned. Companies including Gaskiya Textile Mills, Kano Textile Limited, African Textile Manufacturers Plc and Tofa Textile Mills all shut down, while Kaduna’s United Nigerian Textiles Plc, once Nigeria’s largest textile company with over 7,000 workers, closed in 2007 after failing to survive competition from smuggled products routed through Kano and Katsina.
At the Kaduna engagement, the Kaduna State Commissioner for Agriculture, Murtala Dabo, described the new initiative as a lifeline for cotton farmers left without reliable markets since the textile mills collapsed, while the Permanent Secretary of the Kaduna Ministry of Business, Innovation and Technology, Malam Waheed Musa, acknowledged that more than 10 textile industries in the state had shut down in recent years despite Kaduna remaining northern Nigeria’s textile hub.
Bassey said the ministry was working with research institutions and development partners to address the cotton quality and supply problems affecting manufacturers, while discussions with the Bank of Industry and the Bank of Agriculture were ongoing on affordable financing for small and medium-scale manufacturers.
She identified electricity costs as a major obstacle but said increased gas utilisation, including the planned Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano gas pipeline, was expected to lower energy expenses for industries.
She added that an existing inter-agency task force was tackling textile smuggling and counterfeiting, one of the factors THE WHISTLER investigation identified as central to the industry’s earlier collapse.
Stakeholders at the engagement expressed optimism that improved policies, infrastructure, financing and energy access would restore the sector, whose workforce once numbered more than 350,000 nationally, according to the Textile Association of Nigeria, before its steady decline over the past three decades.
A comparison of the roadmap’s promises against the findings of THE WHISTLER investigation shows that nearly every cause of the industry’s collapse now has a corresponding pledge.
Against the World Bank’s $2.2bn smuggling estimate, the government points to an existing inter-agency task force.
Against the diesel-driven cost burden that crippled manufacturers, it offers increased gas utilisation and the planned Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano pipeline. Against the currency devaluation and inflation that eroded profitability, it proposes fresh fiscal and regulatory incentives under a revised 2015 policy.
Against the cotton quality and supply shortages that weakened mills, it cites new partnerships with research institutions.
Against the credit squeeze that hastened closures such as Tofa Textile Mills’, it points to ongoing talks with the Bank of Industry and Bank of Agriculture on SME financing. And against the failed privatisations that doomed firms like NISUCO, the roadmap speaks only of identifying “strategic assets” for revitalisation, without detailing new safeguards against a repeat of that history.
What remains unaddressed, both in Bassey’s remarks and in the roadmap as presented, is enforcement and accountability.
The task force approach to smuggling has existed before without halting the influx of cheaper imports, and the 2015 policy, now being revised, was itself unable to prevent the sector’s decline.
Nor did officials at the Kaduna engagement offer job-creation targets or timelines against which the industry’s promised recovery, and the more than 350,000 jobs lost since its peak, can be measured.
(The Whistler)