Nigeria's Senate has called for a ban on textile imports and a full-scale revival of the country's shuttered mills, a dramatic legislative push that — if it holds — would upend one of the most trafficked grey markets in West Africa and force a reckoning with an industry that once employed over 600,000 Nigerians.
At its peak in the 1980s, Nigeria's textile sector was the second-largest employer in the country after the federal civil service, anchoring entire economies in Kaduna, Kano, Funtua, and Asaba. Today, fewer than 20 mills are still operational out of the roughly 175 that existed four decades ago, and industry estimates suggest fewer than 25,000 formal textile workers remain — a collapse measured not just in factory closures but in ghost towns, idle looms, and families across the North-West and South-West that never recovered.
The pressure on those survivors has come from a single, persistent direction: cheap imports, predominantly from China, India, and increasingly from smaller Asian manufacturers, that flood Nigerian markets at prices no domestic mill — carrying the weight of high energy costs, ageing equipment, and naira depreciation — can match. An estimated 80 percent of fabrics sold in markets from Ariaria in Aba to Kantin Kwari in Kano are imported, most of them entering through both legitimate and unofficial channels.
The Senate's intervention arrives against a backdrop of mounting economic pressure. The naira has lost more than half its value since the 2023 foreign exchange liberalisation, making imported inputs for surviving mills even more expensive while simultaneously making smuggled foreign textiles — priced in dollars bought on the parallel market — paradoxically competitive. For the roughly 2.1 million informal traders who buy and resell fabrics across Nigeria's 36 states, an import ban without a credible domestic supply alternative would mean immediate stock shortages and price shocks, particularly ahead of the festive season when fabric demand surges.
The Senate urged the federal government to move decisively on both fronts — sealing the import pipeline while simultaneously deploying targeted incentives to resuscitate dormant mills, including reviewing energy tariffs for manufacturers, providing low-interest credit lines through the Bank of Industry, and rehabilitating cotton supply chains across Zamfara, Kebbi, and Katsina states where raw cotton once fed the northern mills directly. Lawmakers framed the revival not merely as an industrial policy question but as a national security and employment imperative, noting that idle youth populations in the cotton belt remain vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups.
What happens next will depend heavily on whether the executive arm moves with the urgency the Senate is demanding. The Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment will be central to any implementation — and its track record on textile revival pledges, which date back at least to the Obasanjo-era policy interventions of the early 2000s, has been one of announced frameworks and unfulfilled timelines. Nigerians should watch for whether this call crystallises into a specific legislative instrument — a bill, a resolution with executive directive, or a committee report with binding recommendations — and whether the Nigeria Customs Service receives a corresponding operational mandate to tighten the ports and land borders that remain the primary entry point for contraband fabric.
