According a leading news site, Punch, there has been an unprecedented flow of investments from multinational manufacturing corporations into various sectors of the Nigerian economy in the last decade. The multinational manufacturing companies have forayed into the Nigerian market do good business, and are affirming the potential of Nigeria as an exciting and largely unexploited market offering a huge opportunity for local and global enterprises to capitalize on.
However, the major concern is that ‘home-grown’ enterprises are not taking the advantage of opportunities in their home market. The local textile and garment manufacturing value chain, in particular, is not able to capitalize on the country’s potential due to lack of initiatives and funding from the Government.
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In the era of ’50s to ’80s, Nigeria had over 140 textile manufacturing factories, accounting for 25 per cent of the nation’s employees in the manufacturing sector and accounted for over 60 per cent of the textile industry capacity in West Africa. However, with Government’s apparent focus on the oil sector in the 1980s, the development of the textile industry gradually became stagnated. As such, an industry which once boasted an annual growth rate of 67 per cent in 1991, now has 25 textile mills operating, with all running at less than 40 per cent of installed capacity and employing just over 25,000 people.
In countries like India, Vietnam and the USA, textile manufacturing is making huge economic contributions and driving growth and development… Nigeria’s textile industry can once again become the booming sector of the country if restructuring of policies and schemes takes place to better fund and support the T&C sector.
