In 1985 Nigeria had 175 functioning textile mills, employed roughly 600,000 people directly in spinning, weaving, dyeing and garment-making, and ran the second-largest textile industry in sub-Saharan Africa after Egypt. By 2010 fewer than 25 mills were operating; by 2019, ten; by 2024, the surviving cluster could be counted on two hands — chiefly Sunflag (Lagos), the rump of Nichemtex, the rehabilitated Funtua Textile Mills (Katsina), and a small post-2022 federal-supported reopening at United Nigerian Textiles Limited (UNTL) Kaduna. Direct employment had fallen by over 95%, from ~600,000 to under 25,000. Few collapses in any developing-world manufacturing sector have been this complete and this fast.
The industry itself was a colonial-and-postcolonial composite. The deep roots were indigenous: the Kano-Zaria indigo dyeing and weaving complex that supplied the Trans-Saharan trade for centuries, the Yoruba aso-oke loom tradition, the Akwete and Okene weaving clusters. The modern mill industry was built between 1956 and 1979 by three waves of investors: Lebanese trading families (the Chanrai, Chellaram, Khalil groups), Indian-British capital (UAC and the David Whitehead chain that became Nichemtex, UNTL), and the Northern Regional Government / NNDC (Kaduna Textiles 1957, Arewa Textiles 1965, Funtua 1978). Cotton was sourced from a 400,000-hectare smallholder belt across Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kano and the Adamawa-Gongola corridor. Lint went into spinning mills; yarn into weaving; greige cloth into the dyeing and printing houses; the finished African prints, Ankara, kampala and adire-style rolls, into a Lagos-Kano-Aba wholesale market that supplied West Africa from Dakar to Douala.
The collapse had four causes, sequenced.
Cause 1 — Power. Textile mills are electricity-intensive and run continuous shifts. As the grid degraded after 1990, mill self-generation costs rose to 35–55% of total operating cost by 2005. No competitor industry in China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Vietnam ran on diesel.
Cause 2 — The 1986 SAP devaluation and import liberalisation. The naira collapse made imported spares and dyestuffs unaffordable while simultaneously dropping the tariff wall that had protected the mills from East Asian finished cloth. Mills lost both their input pricing and their output pricing in the same eighteen months.
Cause 3 — Smuggling and the China–Cotonou route. From the mid-1990s onward, Chinese-printed Ankara and wax-print cloth — cheaper, brighter, faster turnaround on new designs — was containerised through Cotonou and brought across the Seme border into Lagos, exactly as the tokunbo car and the Chinese electronics wave were brought in. Anti-smuggling bans (1997, 2002, 2010, 2015) were unenforceable. By 2010, over 85% of Ankara sold at Balogun Market was Chinese-printed; the African prints sold in Cotonou and Lomé to Dakar were Chinese; the surviving Nigerian mills could not compete on price or on design refresh cycles.
Cause 4 — Cotton-belt collapse. As the mills shut, the smallholder cotton farmers in Katsina, Zamfara and Kano lost their buyer, switched to maize and sesame, and the ginning chain disintegrated. By 2018 Nigeria — historically a cotton exporter — was importing raw cotton lint to feed the surviving mills. The Textile Development Fund (₦100bn in 2009, ₦50bn top-up in 2014) bailed out a handful of mills temporarily but reversed nothing.
The social geography of the collapse is concentrated. Kaduna lost UNTL (the country's largest single mill at its peak), Arewa Textiles, Finetex and Norspin within a decade; Kano lost Gaskiya, Universal, Bagauda and at least nine other mills; Lagos lost Aswani, Afprint, Enpee and Five Star; Onitsha and Aba lost their garment-conversion clusters as the cloth supply dried up. The 600,000 lost jobs were disproportionately Northern, disproportionately male, and disproportionately heads-of-household — they sit somewhere in the early-2000s rise of almajirai swelling (Sharia & Almajiri story), the 2009 Boko Haram emergence (Boko Haram), and the bandit-and-out-of-work-youth pool of the 2015–2024 North-West insecurity. No serious analyst draws a single causal line from the textile collapse to insurgency, but the labour history is in the timeline.
What survived is a memory and a market. The aso-oke weavers of Iseyin and Ede, the adire dyers of Abeokuta and Osogbo, the indigo pits of Kofar Mata in Kano (the last surviving traditional pit set, dated to 1498) — these continue, on a craft scale, supplying the design end of a Nigerian fashion industry that has gone global on Instagram and the Afrobeats wave. The mass-market mill, the one that put a wage into 600,000 homes and a tax line into the federal budget, has not returned. Like the railways and the refineries, it is one of the large industrial systems Nigeria built once, lost, and has not yet rebuilt.
Figure 1
Nigerian textile industry: active mills and employment, 1960–2024
From 180 mills and 600,000 workers in 1991 to nine mills and ten thousand workers today. Diesel, smuggled Chinese print, and the naira collapse killed it three times over.