Lost history · 1960s to 2024
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
More than 150 textile companies collapsed across Nigeria. In Funtua, one survived, though it had not made a single naira of profit in twenty years. Its chairman's order was simple: keep working, and do not lay anybody off.
Long before there were factories in Northern Nigeria, there were women who spun cotton by hand. Spinning is the step that turns a soft ball of cotton into thread, and without it there is no cloth. In 2024 a Trust TV reporter, Ibrahim Ismail, went to Funtua in Katsina State and met one of those women still at work.
Her name is Aishatu Garba, and she was seventy-four years old. She had been spinning for more than forty years. She learned the craft in Funtua in the 1960s, after she married and moved to the town. In those days, she remembered, an old man used to take the women's thread to the market and sell it, and the money changed hands in pennies and kobo.
Her husband, Alhaji Garba, also worked with cotton thread. He bought the raw cotton, and she spun it for him. He has since died, and now she spins for her son. He buys the thread from her, and she is glad of it, because the money helps her. Sometimes he sends her two or three thousand naira to buy cotton, and when he has sold the last batch, he asks for more. The reporter found it a wonder to watch her at work, an old woman still standing on her own feet and still keeping alive a craft that belongs to the whole North.
Women like her were once the backbone of the cotton trade. Farming was the heart of the northern economy. Groundnut pyramids rose across the North-west, and cotton was a special crop. Farmers would begin to work the soil around June and July, and from November into January everyone hoped for a big harvest. Peasant farmers in Katsina, Sokoto and Zaria grew it. As far back as the fourteenth century, Muslim traders had built a well-organised network for selling cotton, with Kano, Bida and Ilorin as its trading centres. By 1905 Nigeria was sending cotton to Britain.
The historian Professor Alkasum Abba, who once taught at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, told the reporter that Nigerians grew cotton long before the colonial era. When the British came, he said, they did not find people naked. They found people in clothes, living in towns. Britain's own industry had started with wool, because of its cold weather, but cotton could be worn in heat and cold alike, so the British turned to it.
After independence, Professor Abba explained, the regional government set up marketing boards to encourage farmers, and also built textile factories in Kaduna with foreign partners. Slowly the country began to change from a seller of raw cotton into a maker of cloth. The Sardauna, Sir Ahmadu Bello, saw the North growing rich on its farms. Kaduna Textiles Limited began work in 1957, and Arewa Textiles, Nortex, United Nigeria Textiles and others followed. By the 1980s, the report says, cotton made up as much as a quarter of Nigeria's GDP, and there were more than 180 textile companies in operation.
Funtua was at the centre of it. The town was a busy commercial hub, a meeting place for cotton dealers from home and abroad. The reporter, who drove about 150 kilometres from Kaduna to get there, visited the great Funtua rock in the middle of town. Elders told him it was the town's ancient symbol and the place where cotton merchants and traders from across the North used to gather.
Then the fall came. Poor electricity, machines that were never maintained, and bad leadership brought down more than 150 textile companies across the country over the following decades. More than a million workers lost their jobs. One of them, Napoleon Ngakto, used to work at a textile factory in Kaduna that is now dead. He remembered how, in 1995, a worker could earn twenty to twenty-five thousand naira, with overtime, and how in good years the company would announce bonuses from its profits.
Funtua Textiles Limited is one of fewer than thirty textile companies left in Nigeria. It has machines for ginning, spinning, weaving and finishing. It sells inside and outside Nigeria, and it gives work to hundreds of people.
Its administration and public relations manager, Ibrahim Mu'azu, told the story plainly. The company was set up in 1978 and commissioned in 1979. It has kept running all this time, he said, because of strong leadership and people who care about their workers. Then he said something few managers would admit. As they spoke, the company had not made one naira of profit in twenty years.
So why was it still open? Because of an order from the chairman to the board: keep working as long as you are breaking even. And they did not want to hear any talk of redundancy or cutting staff.
At its height, the factory had about 3,400 workers. Refusing to sack anyone meant finding another way to survive, and they found one. They let the workforce shrink on its own. If a worker chose to leave, nobody new was hired to replace them. If a worker retired, the person working beside them took over the job. Year by year the numbers fell, but nobody was pushed out.
Mu'azu said that if the last factories were to be saved, the federal government had to provide steady, affordable electricity. Over thirty years, governments had put more than 1.18 billion dollars into schemes to revive dead textile companies, and none of them worked. An economist, Dr Sambo Ingawa, blamed high inflation, which made goods made at home dearer than goods from abroad. Cotton farming itself had become fragile too, with farmers struggling to earn enough from their work.
The report ends with the factory still standing, still struggling, and still not certain of what comes next. In the same town, a seventy-four-year-old woman was still spinning thread by hand.
