In a major move to rescue Nigeria’s ailing manufacturing sector, the Senate has called on the Federal Government to impose an outright ban on the importation of foreign textile materials.
The legislative directive is aimed at reviving the country’s struggling textile industry, stimulating local cotton production, and reclaiming a market currently dominated by foreign goods.
The Upper Chamber also urged the executive arm, specifically the Ministries of Agriculture and Trade and Investment, to take urgent steps to resuscitate textile manufacturing nationwide.
Lawmakers placed a particular emphasis on the historically vital Kaduna-Kano industrial corridor, citing its immense potential to create thousands of jobs and help mitigate the country’s rising youth unemployment and worsening insecurity.
These resolutions followed the adoption of a motion titled “Urgent Need to Revive the Textile Industries in Nigeria with Particular Reference to the Kaduna-Kano Axis.”
The motion was sponsored by Senator Sunday Katung (PDP, Kaduna South) and co-sponsored by several other lawmakers across party and regional lines, reflecting a unified parliamentary stance on the economic issue.
While presenting the motion, Senator Katung took lawmakers down memory lane, recalling that Nigeria’s first large-scale textile manufacturing mill was established in Kaduna in 1957.
This pioneering feat later spread to other regions, transforming the sector into a major pillar of national industrial growth and a leading employer of labour in the post-independence era.
However, the lawmaker lamented the sector’s steady and heartbreaking decline over the decades. He attributed the collapse of the multi-billion naira industry to obsolete equipment, inadequate capital, inconsistent power supply, and unfavourable policy challenges.
To reverse this trend, the Senate ultimately called for increased funding to the Bank of Industry to support textile companies, while tasking the Ministry of Agriculture to aggressively promote cotton farming as the backbone of the sector’s survival.
