After years of advocacy, Nigeria has inaugurated a steering committee for the Cotton, Textile and Garment Development Board. The mandate is comprehensive, the institutional design is sound, and the historical record of Nigerian textile policy is sobering. FBA analyses all three
In a spinning mill in Kaduna that was once one of Nigeria’s largest textile employers, a maintenance engineer is keeping two machines operational that should have been replaced in 2003. The machines produce fabric. They produce it slowly, expensively, and not at the quality standard that the premium fashion market demands. But they are running, and the three hundred workers they support are employed, and the engineer who tends them knows the history: that there were once forty-three mills in this city alone, and that most of them are now silent or demolished. He also knows that the National Economic Council has approved the establishment of a Cotton, Textile and Garment Development Board, and that the federal government has designated the CTG sector as its flagship industrial policy pilot for 2026. He is, cautiously, watching.
Nigeria’s cotton, textile and garment sector carries the specific weight of a lost industrial era. At its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s, the sector employed hundreds of thousands of workers, supported cotton cultivation across northern states including Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, and Zamfara, and produced fabrics of sufficient quality to command international export markets.The decline driven by infrastructure failure, policy inconsistency, import competition, and smuggling that undermined protective tariffs was not inevitable. It was the accumulated consequence of specific decisions and specific failures over three decades. Reversing it requires understanding those failures precisely rather than simply renewing the aspiration to do better.
What the CTGDB Is and How It Came to Exist
The Cotton, Textile and Garment Development Board was approved at the 149th National Economic Council meeting on April 24, 2025. In March 2026, the federal government inaugurated a Steering Committee charged with developing the framework for the board’s establishment. The committee is chaired by the Director Overseeing the Office of Political and Economic Affairs in the SGF’s office and brings together ten sector bodies: the Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association, the Fashion Designers Association of Nigeria, the Apparel and Accessories Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, the National Cotton Association of Nigeria, the Nigerian Cotton Farmers Cooperative Society, the Textile Researchers Association of Nigeria, the New Nigeria Development Company, the Cotton Ginners Association of Nigeria, the Cotton, Textile and Garment Development Forum, and Kaduna State.
The breadth of the committee’s membership reflects an understanding of the value chain’s integrated nature that previous textile policy interventions have often lacked. Cotton farmers, spinners, weavers, garment manufacturers, fashion designers, and the state most associated with textile production are all at the table. This is the right institutional design for a body whose mandate covers the entire value chain from seed to shelf.
The Mandate and Its Logic
The proposed CTGDB is designed to provide an integrated institutional platform for coordinating policy, investment, incentives, standards, and performance across the CTG value chain. The coordinator of the Cotton, Textile and Garment Development Forum, Anibe Achimugu, described the inauguration as marking Nigeria’s transition “from advocacy to implementation, from intention to delivery, and from aspiration to measurable national impact.” The language of transition is deliberately chosen: the history of Nigerian textile policy is one of aspiration not translated into implementation, and the framing acknowledges that awareness of the problem.
Nigeria imported textiles and textile articles worth N814.3 billion in the first nine months of 2025, a significant increase from N552.3 billion in the same period of 2024. The direction of travel increasing import dependence in a sector that Nigeria once dominated makes the urgency of the CTGDB’s mandate concrete rather than abstract. The global textile industry is worth $1.39 trillion and projected to reach $2 trillion; Nigeria’s current share of that value is a fraction of what its resource endowment and labour force should produce.
The History That Creates Caution
Nigeria has announced textile revival initiatives before. The policy archive is substantial: import restriction regimes, textile revival funds, industrial development corporations with textile mandates, zone-based incentive programmes. The reasons previous interventions underperformed are consistent and well-documented. Power infrastructure inadequacy made domestic production uncompetitive even with tariff protection. Customs enforcement failures allowed smuggled textile imports to undermine the protection that tariffs were designed to provide. Policy inconsistency across electoral cycles disrupted the long-term investment planning that manufacturing requires. Limited access to industrial finance prevented manufacturers from making the capital investments needed to modernise and compete.
The CTGDB’s design must address these specific failure modes rather than simply articulating a better version of the same aspirations. Power infrastructure, customs enforcement, long-term industrial financing, and a commitment to policy consistency across administrations are the hard requirements. Without them, the CTGDB will be a well-designed institution producing well-documented progress reports about a sector that continues to decline.
What the Fashion Industry Needs from the CTGDB
For Nigeria’s fashion designers and brands, the consumer-facing end of the CTG value chain, the CTGDB’s most important deliverables are specific. Domestic fabric supply that meets commercial fashion production quality standards would reduce the input costs and supply chain risks that currently force designers to source internationally. Standards and certification infrastructure that enables Nigerian manufacturers to demonstrate compliance with international requirements would open export markets that are currently inaccessible. Investment facilitation that attracts capital to the specific gaps in manufacturing and processing infrastructure would build the production capacity that designers cannot access individually.
The CTGDB is the most significant institutional development in Nigerian textile policy in years. Its design is right. Its political backing is serious. The external commercial environment nearshoring, AfCFTA, ESG sourcing demands has rarely been more favourable for African textile manufacturing. What remains to be demonstrated is that this iteration of Nigerian textile policy can execute where its predecessors could not. The industry is watching with cautious, informed hope.
