- What to do to revive the industry
Things must be extremely bad for some people to say they “feel dead and buried” even while they are still alive. But that is the situation with the sacked textile workers in the country. A detailed report on the once prosperous textile sector by this paper titled: “We feel dead and buried – sad tales from sacked textile workers” published on March 18 vividly tells the story of the textile worker, from the inception of the first modern textile firm, Kaduna Textile Ltd (KTL), founded and financed by the 19 Northern states in 1957, to about year 2002 when it was shut down, as well as stories of other textile workers in the country.
Sudden loss of job is always a harrowing experience. But it is especially so when those sacked used to enjoy some of the best of whatever made life tick, only to fall to ground zero. The matter becomes sadder when the workers left unceremoniously without being paid any entitlements. This is the fate of many of the sacked workers.
Nigeria had about 200 textile firms in the 1980s but only 128 of them survived until the 1990s. However, by 2008, more than half of them had closed shop. Seven years later, only about 33 were functional; today, there are less than 25 of them in operation. The textile sector was the biggest manufacturing industry in the country in the 1980s, and the third largest in Africa, after Egypt and South Africa.
Prof Adesoji Adesanya of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) put the conservative estimates of indirect and direct job losses at about three million, that is “if you put together the expanded opportunities for cotton growers, ginneries, spinning, weavers, colouring and patterning of clothing. When the going was good, many textile workers had no problem catering to the needs of their families.
The job losses expectedly came with many social dislocations. We had breadwinners who could no longer provide for their families. They could no longer afford to pay their children’s school fees; they could no longer pick their medical bills; many were ejected from their rented apartments over unpaid rents; in short, many lost their dignity. For instance, Wordam Simdik lost his 19-year-old son over his inability to pay his medical bill following his admission after he was stabbed by some of his friends. He joined the friends because his father could not afford to send him to school. Mama Asabe Audu Jaba whose husband was one of the first set of workers at KTL where he had worked for 44 years until the firm closed in 2002 died in 2009 without any entitlements. That is not all; she also watched two of her 11 children die slowly at home because she could not afford to take them to hospital when they fell ill.
There are countless other heartrending stories. Suffice it to say that the story of the textile sector is a tragic story of a once flourishing industry that has now gone comatose. Successive governments seemed to have realised the potential of the sector to lift many Nigerians out of the unemployment market and have therefore pumped so much money to revive it. Unfortunately, this has not made a dent on the sector.
Could it be the money was not properly applied? Maybe; maybe not. But there are other issues to address. The textile sector, like other sectors, cannot grow in a situation where power supply is epileptic. Then, smuggling is not helping matters. But smuggling will always thrive since goods produced locally are more expensive than imported ones.
Therefore, the government has to address these issues holistically. The tragic fortune is that labour is still affordable in the country. Perhaps to encourage the sector, the government can compel its ministries, agencies and departments to start patronising the textile industries so they can have something to do on a sustainable basis. Military, police National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) uniforms can be contracted out to the local textile mills. On their part, the textile firms too have to upgrade their equipment such that they can improve on their design and make their products attractive and truly competitive.
