Nigeria’s textile mills need urgent reawakening

By Oladeni Mojisola

A country’s soul can be glimpsed in the humming of its factories and measured rhythm of its machines. In China, for instance, we’ve seen how mass industrialisation rewrote the story of a country with crawling economy into a country with the second biggest nominal GDP in the world. Here in Nigeria, in the 1970s and 1980s, our textile sector was exactly that sort of place where hope was knitted into the fabric of national enterprise, where over 180 textile mills spun dreams into reality while employing hundreds of thousands of direct labourers and supporting millions of cotton farmers, tailors, traders and families. Contrastingly, today, many of us walk through the markets of Lagos, Kano, Onitsha and Abuja and see shelves heavy with foreign-made fabrics while our own once-proud mills stand silent and rusted. It feels like an ache that will not fade, because we are losing not just an industry but a heartbeat of our economy.

The statistics themselves have a stifling rustle, like worn cloth crumbling under the weight of truth. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reveals that the textile industry’s contribution to Nigeria’s gross domestic product has dwindled steadily over recent years, sinking from N1.332 trillion in 2020 to N1.224 trillion in 2024, while its relative share of GDP shrank from 1.9 percent to 1.63 percent over the same period. These figures, stark and unblinking, lay bare a sector gasping for breath amid swelling imports and a weakening domestic pulse. More saddening is the fact that the human cost of this decline is more than arithmetic. In the heady heyday of the 1980s and early 1990s, the textile sector employed upwards of 500,000 workers directly, with ghana of indirect jobs spanning the agricultural hinterlands where cotton fields nodded in the sun. Today, that workforce has been reduced to fewer than 20,000 souls who remain connected to the mills, their livelihood precarious and their prospects muted. What does it mean for young families to lose such opportunities? What happens to the dreams of a generation when their skills are rendered obsolete by policy neglect and rampant importation?

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Whenever a nation loses its capacity to clothe itself, it loses something sacred about its independence. Once upon a time, Nigerian textiles found markets in West and Central Africa, the products of Kaduna, Kano and Onitsha weaving their way across borders with a dignity matched by few. But the exportability of Nigerian cloth has faded and retreated from prominence to near invisibility in global markets, as cheaper foreign textiles undercut our fabric and our fortunes. The narrative is not just economic but existential: if we cannot make cloth for ourselves, how can we expect to compete in the world’s bigger arenas? Smuggling and import surges are not abstract curses but daily realities that whisper through our ports and borders. Between 2020 and 2024 officially recorded textile imports into Nigeria soared almost 300 percent, from N182.53 billion to N726.18 billion, the result of porous borders and a ravenous appetite for cheaper goods that are often counterfeited or mislabelled as culturally authentic. In markets across the land, it is all too common to see ‘Ankara’ and ‘Adire’ prints stamped with brilliance but stitched abroad, outcompeting local products that carry the sweat and stories of Nigerian hands.

This collapse did not happen overnight, nor did it occur in isolation. It was born of a series of policy tremors and structural shifts, from inconsistent tariff regimes to inadequate energy supply that left factories crippled by the cost of power. Smuggling thrives where borders are weak; domestic production falters where electricity remains a luxury. In an industry that requires reliable power for looms and dyes, mills have been strangled by blackouts and climbing tariffs that render them uncompetitive against products from nations where energy is cheap and abundant. A revival of this great sector ought not to be mere rhetoric but a deliberate weaving of strategy with resolve. Look at Bangladesh for instance, a nation that transformed its textile industry into a global powerhouse through targeted policy, infrastructure investment and integration into international value chains. Could Nigeria, with its vast labour pool and raw material potential, chart a similar course? It is a question that hangs heavy, asking whether we have the will to rebuild from the ashes. Some voices of national conscience have spoken of this pain. “The textile industry remains a critical plank for addressing unemployment and security challenges,” said NTMA President Folorunsho Daniyan, (https://www.thisdaylive.com/2022/05/13/117000-jobs-lost-in-nigerias-textile-industry-in-26-years-says-textile-association/?utm) urging comprehensive policy action when the losses were laid bare across years of decline. A generation that watched its mills collapse is now urging leadership to act with urgency, lest the unravelling of fabric become symbolic of a broader unraveling in national coherence.

Reviving textile mills is more than reopening factories; it is restoring dignity to regions once alive with industry, reigniting rural economies where cotton farming once fed families and invigorated markets. The value chain, from seed to seam, needs deliberate nurturing: support for cotton farmers, incentives for machine modernisation, and protective frameworks that discourage illicit imports while fostering genuine competition. Without these, we risk sewing a future that continues to unravel at the edges. We must also pose a harder question: what does it mean for Nigeria if this sector continues to wither? A nation so rich in human capital and natural fibres reduced to a net importer of textiles, reliant on external sources for cloth to cover its people. That paradox alone should spark urgency in every heart that cares about our economic self-respect and future security.

This is not a matter for economists alone, nor only for policymakers. It is a matter of national consciousness. When factories stand idle and workers depart their skills, the ripple effects touch children who cannot afford education, families who cannot sustain homes, and communities that lose their purpose. To revive textile mills is to breathe life into towns and villages long acquainted with abandonment. Thus, let us awaken from this slumber of indifference and recognise that every mill shuttered represents livelihoods lost and potential wasted. The reawakening of Nigeria’s textile mills would not be a simple commercial triumph but a rebirth of national pride, an affirmation that we can build, that we can create, that our people’s hands and minds are worthy of the world’s stage. In that resurgence lies not merely prosperity but dignity restored.

•Mojisola is the CEO of House of Moh