If you drive through the Kakuri industrial area of Kaduna today, you will see what economic collapse looks like. Among the overgrown weeds and crumbling structures stand the skeletal remains of factories that once hummed with machinery operating three shifts a day. The head of a local vigilante group was killed here last year pursuing criminals into one of these abandoned mills. These ruins were once the heartbeat of Northern Nigeria’s economy—and a warning to every Nigerian.
There was a time when Kaduna was the textile capital of West Africa. Sir Ahmadu Bello established Kaduna Textiles Limited in 1957 after visiting Egypt. By the 1980s, Nigeria had 167 textile mills employing over 500,000 workers directly. The industry contributed nearly 25 per cent of manufacturing employment and was the second-largest employer after the federal government.
Kaduna became a city built on cloth. Factories along the Kakuri-Makera industrial axis—United Nigeria Textiles, Kaduna Textiles, Arewa Textiles, Supertex—drew workers from across the country. A single factory like UNTL employed over 10,000 workers. Landlords prospered. Food sellers thrived. Schools flourished. The industry was not a sector; it was an economic ecosystem.
Workers sent remittances home to villages across the Middle Belt and northern states—paying school fees, building houses, supporting extended families. For generations, the textile factories were the path out of poverty and into the middle class.
But the textile industry was never solely a Northern phenomenon. Chief Obafemi Awolowo established textile industries in the West, including Western Nigeria Textile Mills in Ikeja, drawing on cotton grown by Yoruba farmers in Abeokuta—cotton with the highest staple length and finest fibres among Nigerian varieties. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe pursued industrial development with equal vigour, establishing textile mills in Aba and other eastern cities, drawing on northern cotton and local cultivation. By the 1970s, Nigeria had achieved what few African nations could boast: a truly national textile industry.
Then it all collapsed.
The decline began with the Structural Adjustment Program of 1986. Trade liberalisation opened Nigeria’s borders, and smugglers followed. By the late 1990s, smuggled textiles accounted for 70 per cent of the Nigerian market. Foreign manufacturers counterfeited Nigerian brands—producing exact copies of popular fabrics in China and selling them at prices up to 80 per cent lower than what local mills could charge. The Director General of the Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association put it simply: “No Nigerian textile mill can produce at that price.”
Policy inconsistency made matters worse. The government alternated between banning imports and lifting bans. The national power grid deteriorated, forcing factories to run on diesel generators that doubled production costs. Nigerian mills operated on machinery from the 1960s while the global industry modernised. Interest rates averaged 32 per cent, making recapitalisation impossible.
Then came the final, devastating blow: the collapse of cotton production. In the 1980s, Nigeria produced over 300,000 metric tonnes of cotton annually. Today, that figure has plummeted to barely 15,000 metric tonnes—a decline of 95 per cent. The number of farmers has slumped from 620,000 to barely 100,000 across major cotton-producing states. The number of ginneries has collapsed from over 210 to fewer than 15. Over 22,500 cotton farmers in Kano State alone have abandoned the crop.
What makes this decline particularly alarming is the dramatic drop in yields. Nigerian farmers now produce an average of just 500 to 600 kilograms per hectare—down from 1.5 to 2.0 tonnes in previous decades. Even the BT cotton varieties introduced with optimism have underperformed due to poor seed quality, lack of extension services, and the worsening security situation.
This brings us to the heart of the matter: insecurity is now an existential threat to any economic revival in the North. The cotton belt across Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, and Sokoto has been devastated by banditry. Farmers cannot access their fields. Ibrahim Mu’azu Isah of Funtua Textiles recently recounted: “I travelled from Funtua to Zamfara, but I couldn’t find a single cotton farm. It has now all turned to soybeans. If you know that you are going to be killed or kidnapped, you won’t even think of going to farm.”
Samuel Oloruntoba of Cotton Ginning Company in Kaduna painted an equally grim picture: “Cotton production is no longer there. Insecurity in Katsina and Zamfara is so severe that bandits recently attacked the community around my factory.” A staff member at UNTL explained the direct consequence: “We cannot even get raw materials because the farmers are complaining that bandits won’t allow them to go to their farms.”
Today, fewer than 24 textile mills remain operational across Nigeria. Nigeria now imports $4 billion worth of textiles annually—99 per cent of what we consume. Over 3,000 former textile workers have died since the closures, many unable to afford basic healthcare. The Coalition of Closed and Unpaid Textile Workers reports that over 10, 000 workers remain unpaid their gratuities and benefits. Many okada riders in Kaduna and Kano are former textile workers. “Seventy per cent of the Okada riders that you see around are former textiles workers,” a labour leader told me.
His Royal Highness, Muhammad Sanusi II, the 16th Emir of Kano and Chairman of UNTL, has warned that the collapse of the textile industry has contributed to rising insecurity in the region. The connection is direct and cyclical: insecurity prevents cotton farming, which starves mills of raw materials, which eliminates jobs, which deepens poverty, which creates conditions for further violence.
The federal government has recently taken steps to revive the sector—establishing the Cotton Textile and Garment Development Board and introducing BT cotton varieties. But the most significant investment, a $2 billion garment factory in Ogun State projected to employ 150,000 people, raises troubling questions. Ogun is not among Nigeria’s major cotton-producing states. The factory will either import cotton or source it from the North—so why not locate it closer to the source and revive the industry where it once thrived? The northern states that powered Nigeria’s textile industry are being bypassed not because they lack the land, farmers, or expertise, but because the federal government has failed to secure the conditions for economic activity.
The revival of the textile industry in Nigeria is possible. The conditions that destroyed it can be addressed. But this requires a coherent strategy: securing the cotton belt, enforcing border integrity against smuggling, providing consistent long-term policy, and investing in infrastructure. Most urgently, it requires recognising that insecurity is not just a security problem—it is an economic emergency destroying the raw material base for any future industrial revival. Without cotton, there can be no textile industry. Without security, there can be no cotton.
The abandoned factories of Kaduna, Ikeja, and Aba stand as monuments to what was lost. They are also a challenge to this generation of policymakers. The question is whether Nigeria will accept these monuments as permanent—or summon the will to bring them back to life.