Ministry of agriculture and rural development in 2015, inaugurated a committee to formulate policies on how the cotton textile and garment sectors would be revived.
A year after, no updates from the set up committee.🤔🤔🤔
Nigerians are lamenting that cotton, textile and garments industries across the country have become “shadows of themselves” due to influx of new and 2nd hand textile materials, inconsistent government policies and dumping of sub-standard textile materials in the country.
In the 80s and 90s, the textile and garments industries in Nigeria had over 650,000 employees now employs only about 15,000 people due to the deplorable state of the industry.
The textile industries in Kaduna, Ado Ekiti, Lagos, Aba and Kano, these industries employed over 650,000 Nigerians but today, if you go there, they are ghosts of themselves.
Millions of Nigerians remain jobless, thus, there is an urgent need to create jobs and add value, because Nigerians keep spending so much of the scares forex in importing new and 2nd hand garments from china and from south east Asia.
The Nigerian textile industry has the potential to compete with the best in the world if Nigeria is serious to take the sector revival very seriously by investing in massive cotton wool plantation farming through government support Agric input scheme and single digit interest rate loan from CBN.
Both Federal and State government must be irrevocably committed to ensuring substantial growth in high quality cotton production to feed textile and garment industry, and bring back a thriving textile and garments industry not by lip service.
OPINON by Mayowa Michael Adeleye
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