Nigeria poured ₦1.06 trillion into foreign textile imports in 2025, marking a record high for the country.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics’ Q4 2025 Foreign Trade Report, Nigeria’s textile import bill reached ₦1.06 trillion last year, crossing the trillion-naira threshold for the first time in recent memory.
The figure represents a staggering climb from ₦726.18 billion in 2024, ₦377.47 billion in 2023, and ₦365.46 billion in 2022, meaning that, within just four years, the country’s expenditure on foreign fabrics, garments, yarns, and textile inputs has nearly tripled.
The trajectory is not merely a set of numbers. It is, analysts say, a verdict on decades of policy failure, institutional neglect, and the slow, painful death of an industry that once clothed a nation.
At the height of Nigeria’s textile era in the mid-1980s, the country was home to 175 textile mills, concentrated across Aba, Asaba, Funtua, Gusau, Kaduna, Kano, Port Harcourt, and Lagos.
Kaduna, hosting three of the largest mills, earned itself the nickname “Textile City.” By 1987, Nigeria’s textile industry had grown to become the third largest in Africa, after Egypt and South Africa, employing about 25 percent of all Nigerians working in the manufacturing sector and directly or indirectly supporting more than 17.2 million Nigerians.
That was then. Today, the picture is almost unrecognizable. Once a cornerstone of Nigeria’s industrial economy with over 180 textile mills in operation during the 1980s, the industry has dwindled to fewer than 20 operational mills today. Some accounts are even grimmer: the number of operational factories has plummeted from over 150 in the 1990s to fewer than four, according to some industry estimates.
Employment in the sector dropped from 137,000 in the 1990s to 60,000 by 2002 and further to just 20,000 by 2010. The tax revenues that once flowed into government coffers from textile-related levies have similarly vanished. The looms have gone silent. The spindles have stopped turning.
The causes of this implosion are well-documented, though successive governments have done little to act on them with sufficient urgency:
Power: Nigeria’s textile manufacturing is energy-intensive, and the country’s chronic electricity crisis has made it catastrophically expensive to run a mill.
The acting General Secretary of the National Union of Textile, Garment, and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria noted that Nigeria’s power generation has long failed to exceed 5,000 megawatts, sometimes falling as low as 2,500 megawatts, which is wholly insufficient to sustain a competitive textile industry.
With the national grid unreliable, manufacturers have been forced to power operations with diesel generators, pushing production costs far beyond what imported goods command on the open market.
Smuggling: The import ban on textiles introduced in 2002 under President Olusegun Obasanjo was intended to protect local producers, but it spawned a thriving shadow economy instead. The World Bank estimated that textiles smuggled into Nigeria through Benin were worth $2.2 billion annually, compared to local Nigerian production that shriveled to just $40 million.
Cheap, counterfeit fabrics—many of them reproductions of Nigeria’s own traditional designs manufactured in China—continued to flood markets in Lagos, Kano, Onitsha, and Abuja, undercutting local producers on price with impunity.
Counterfeiting: Nigerian businessmen have themselves been implicated in the practice of taking samples of local fabric designs to China to be reproduced and returned to Nigeria for sale at a fraction of the cost of the original. The result is an industry undermined not only by foreign competition but also by the very entrepreneurs who once sustained it.
Finance and policy inconsistency: The Textile Development Fund Levy, introduced in 1997 to impose a 10 percent tax on imported textiles and channel funds back into local production, has been widely deemed ineffective, with manufacturers reporting they have received no financial support from the initiative.
In 2024, the government secured a $3.5 billion loan from the African Export-Import Bank to revitalize the sector, but industry leaders remain cautious, noting that disbursement of such funds often faces significant delays.
Behind every billion naira on an NBS import chart is a shuttered factory, a displaced cotton farmer in Katsina or Zamfara, or a tailor in Aba purchasing Chinese fabric he once could have sourced from down the road.
Despite its vast domestic market of over 200 million people, Nigeria imports nearly 90 percent of its textile products, spending over $4 billion annually on imported clothing and fabrics. That figure reflects not only the collapse of manufacturing capacity but also the wholesale abandonment of an agricultural-industrial ecosystem—cotton farmers, ginners, spinners, weavers, dyers, and tailors—that once stretched from the fields of the north to the fashion ateliers of Lagos.
The textile sector‘s output has continued to decline, with its contribution to GDP falling from ₦4.548 trillion in 2023 to ₦4.476 trillion in 2024, before dropping further to ₦4.384 trillion in 2025—a 3.6 percent decline over two years. The import surge and the domestic output decline are two sides of the same coin.
The Tinubu administration has signaled renewed intent to reverse the decline. The federal government has unveiled the Nigeria Industrial Policy 2025, which includes establishing a Cotton, Textile, and Garment Development Board, and is pushing to enforce Executive Order 003, which promotes the patronage of locally produced textiles by government agencies.
The National Union of Textile, Garment, and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria has commended the move, with its president describing the proposed board as a landmark initiative signalling the government’s commitment to addressing longstanding structural challenges.
But seasoned industry observers are wary of optimism. Nigeria has announced textile revival plans before. The Textile Revival Implementation Committee, established under a previous administration, set out to achieve self-sufficiency in cotton and textile materials within three years. The ginneries it promised to revive in Gusau, Funtua, Sokoto, Zaria, and elsewhere remain largely idle.
The failure of successive governments to meaningfully revitalize the sector is attributed to poor implementation and endemic corruption, even as repeated promises have been made.
Industry experts say a genuine revival would require a multi-pronged strategy executed with unusual discipline: dedicated power infrastructure for manufacturing zones, aggressive customs enforcement to stop smuggling at the border, targeted tariff protection, affordable financing for manufacturers, and a government procurement policy that actually privileges locally made goods.
Some Lagos-based fashion designers have begun working with surviving mills, such as the Funtua mill in Kaduna, to source local cotton and promote sustainable fashion—a small but meaningful signal that the value chain has not been entirely severed.
But the ₦1.06 trillion import figure is a measure of how far there is to go. Every naira spent on foreign fabric is a naira that could have sustained a Nigerian mill, employed a Nigerian worker, and kept alive an industry that once ranked among the proudest in Africa.
Nigeria is, at present, clothing itself with someone else’s labor and paying a trillion naira a year for the privilege.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Nigeria’s textile import bill has crossed ₦1 trillion for the first time, nearly tripling in just four years. This is not a trade statistic—it is a distress signal. A once-thriving industry that employed millions and ranked third in Africa has been gutted by power failure, rampant smuggling, weak policy enforcement, and official neglect.
The country is now spending a fortune importing what it once made itself. Until Nigeria treats industrial revival as a genuine priority rather than a recurring campaign promise, the looms will stay silent, the factories will stay empty, and the import bill will keep climbing.
