Mr Kwajaffa Hamma, the director-general of the Nigerian Textile Employers Association of Nigeria, has said that none of the moribund textile industries has been revived since 2017.
He said stakeholders in the textile and garment industries were already worried that government was putting more money into cotton production than the moribund textile industries they were supposed to revive.
But cotton farmers also claimed that government’s interventions, which usually come through the Anchor Borrowers Programmme of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), were always late. According to them, this often affects genuine efforts at real cotton production.
Kwajaffa said the problem of the country was not cotton production but the collapse of textile and garment industries.
Reacting to the story that cotton production is now more than domestic demand, he said it was clear that cotton is not the reason for textile industries to be moribund.
“At least most of the companies that produce fabrics already have their ginneries. It means they can farm or buy their own cotton or gin and use for their own textiles. So the essence of the CBN production is not for national consumption. The thing is that it should go in line with textile revival,” he said.
He said government’s intervention was supposed to be top-down, not bottom-top as currently implemented.
“If you revive textile industries, everything will be more available. That is the meaning because now you are producing and you don’t know which textile to sell to; that is the issue. This is why we don’t get our policies right in this country. Policies are not implemented properly; therefore, the essence of generating employment now cannot happen. This is because the essence is that you are supposed to revive the moribund industries and employ multitude of Nigerians in the streets,” he said.