Nigeria's Senate wants to ban textile imports. The Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise is warning that the cure could be worse than the disease.

The Senate recently called for a total ban on the importation of textile products into Nigeria as part of efforts to revive the country's struggling textile industry, create jobs, and strengthen local manufacturing. The resolution followed the adoption of a motion sponsored by Senator Sunday Katung, who recalled that Nigeria had about 167 textile mills during the late 1970s and 1980s, employing nearly 500,000 workers directly and supporting millions of livelihoods across the cotton, textile, and garment value chain.

The Senate's goal is industrialisation. The CPPE's concern is that an immediate ban could destroy more jobs than it creates, with the group warning that up to 10 million livelihoods across the textile, fashion, garment, and downstream trade sectors could be threatened if the policy is implemented without the manufacturing capacity to back it up.

The warning is grounded in a history of costly failures. Over roughly three decades, Nigeria has poured the better part of a billion dollars into reviving the sector, through a Textile Development Fund, a ₦100 billion Cotton, Textile and Garment Fund, a foreign exchange ban on textile importers in 2019, and the border closure that followed. The money was largely disbursed. The bans were duly imposed. And the mills stayed shut.

The structural logic of why bans fail without capacity is equally clear. Nigeria's remaining textile mills currently lack the capacity to meet national demand, making a sudden prohibition of imports likely to widen the gap between demand and local production. That gap provides opportunities for smugglers while depriving the government of customs revenue. Experts warn that a ban does not protect Nigerian factories. It protects the smuggler's margin, turns ordinary traders into criminals, denies the treasury its revenue, and enriches neighbouring ports while punishing the tailors, designers, and garment makers downstream who suddenly cannot find affordable cloth.

The CPPE's prescription is sequencing rather than rejection. Rather than an immediate ban, experts have advocated a phased industrial revival strategy focused on rebuilding cotton production, providing affordable electricity to manufacturers, ensuring access to low-interest financing, and developing integrated textile industrial parks, with a gradual protection regime that would allow local manufacturers to expand capacity before stricter import restrictions are introduced.

Nigeria's 2026 tariff framework has already raised combined duties on imported textile finished products to between 20% and 70%, providing domestic producers with meaningful pricing room to grow without triggering a hard ban, a graduated approach that the CPPE argues is both more sustainable and more honest about where domestic capacity actually stands.

The Senate also urged increased funding for the Bank of Industry for textile companies and called on the Federal Ministry of Agriculture to intensify support for cotton farming, describing cotton production as critical to the sector’s survival. Those upstream investments, the CPPE and independent experts agree, must come before a ban, not after. Nigeria has tried the other sequence before. It knows how that story ends.

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