Nigerian Newsday

Organised labour has written President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua expressing concern over the rapidly declining fortunes of the Nigerian textile industry, with the recent closure of The United Nigeria Textile Limited (UNTL) in Kaduna.

Both the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and its Trade Union Congress (TUC) counterpart, in the letter, lamented that the degree of catastrophe represented by the closure of the UNTL could only be appreciated by reference to the fact that it had hitherto directly employed 5,000 people.

They noted with regret that the closure of the UNTL and other previous ones had not elicited the response of Mr President, which should have been the case if there was sufficient appreciation of the labour absorption and wealth creation potentials of the textile industry.

Given the magnitude of the crises confronting the industry, the NLC and TUC argued that individual operators are totally incapable of mobilizing the means for their survival, explaining that the crisis had been the direct result of unfavourable public policies and failure of public authorities to protect the industry and arrest smuggling.

Labour in addition said "the first area of intervention should be to confront the large scale smuggling and dumping of imported textile fabric into the country and that attempts made in the past to fight the borders, was usually frustrated by politically brokered concessions to smugglers, including the release of impounded goods.

It said further that it is sad that five months worsened, as large scale smuggling of textile is now virtually a daylight affair.

Labour also alleged that it is common knowledge that one of the largest textile smuggling operations on the continent is run by a Nigerian businessman, who incidentally has connections at the highest level of government".