power one toaster for every forty-four of its own people. Billions of dollars assigned to fix the rundown power stations and the dilapidated grid have been squandered or pilfered. A privatization drive in recent years has raised some tentative hope of improvement, but for now Nigeria produces only half as much electricity as North Korea. Even those lucky enough to be connected to a functioning cable face the maddening task of negotiating with what used to be called the National Electric Power Authority, or NEPA (but known as Never Expect Power Anytime). It was rebranded as the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, or PHCN (Please Have Candles Nearby or, simply, Problem Has Changed Name). Most must make do with spluttering diesel generators. In a country where 62 per cent of people live on less than $1.25 a day, running a generator costs about twice as much as the average Briton pays for electricity.3
The crippling cost of electricity makes Nigerian textiles expensive to produce. Raymond, the Kaduna trader, told me he could sell trousers made from Chinese fabric at two-thirds the price of those made from Nigerian fabric and still turn a profit. Hillary Umunna, a few stalls over, concurred. The government’s attempt to support the Nigerian textile sector by banning imports was futile, Hillary opined, his tailor’s tape-measure draped around his shoulders. ‘These things now,’ he said, gesturing at his wares, ‘they say it is contraband. They can’t produce it, but they ban it. So we have to smuggle.’
The cheaper price of smuggled garments relative to locally produced ones was good news, superficially at least, for the traders’ hard-pressed customers but less so for the employees of Nigeria’s textile industry. ‘It is a pitiable situation,’ said Hillary, apparently oblivious to his and his colleagues’ role in their compatriots’ downfall. ‘All the [textile factories] we have here have shut down. The workers are now on the streets.’
In the mid-1980s Nigeria had 175 textile mills. Over the quarter-century that followed, all but 25 shut down. Many of those that have struggled on do so only at a fraction of their capacity. Of the 350,000 people the industry employed in its heyday, making it comfortably Nigeria’s most important manufacturing sector, all but 25,000 have lost their jobs.4 Imports comprise 85 per cent of the market, despite the fact that importing textiles is illegal. The World Bank has estimated that textiles smuggled into Nigeria through Benin are worth $2.2 billion a year, compared with local Nigerian production that has shrivelled to $40 million annually.5 A team of experts working for the United Nations concluded in 2009, ‘The Nigerian textile industry is on the verge of a total collapse.’6 Given the power crisis, the near-impassable state of Nigeria’s roads and the deluge of counterfeit clothes, it is a wonder that the industry kept going as long as it did.
The knock-on effects of this collapse are hard to quantify, but they ripple far into the Nigerian economy, especially in the North. About half of the million farmers who used to grow cotton to supply textile mills no longer do so, although some have switched to other crops. Formal jobs in Nigeria are scarce and precious. Each textile employee supports maybe half a dozen relatives. It is safe to say that the destruction of the Nigerian textile industry has blighted millions of lives.
After I left Kaduna’s market my friend took me to meet some of those who had felt the industry’s collapse hardest. Sitting around on rickety desks in the half-light of a classroom beside the church where some of Kaduna’s Christians were loudly asking a higher power for succour, nine redundant textile workers poured forth their woes. Tens of thousands of textile jobs had disappeared in Kaduna alone, the mill hands told me. I had seen the factory where some of them used to work. The gates of the United Nigerian Textiles plant were firmly shuttered. Jagged glass topped the high walls, and a lone security guard kept watch, protecting the machinery within on the minuscule chance that it would someday whir into action again.* No other living thing came or went, save for the yellow-headed lizards scuttling among the undergrowth.
Father Matthew Hassan Kukah looked pained as he recalled the day when the factory, Kaduna’s last, had closed its doors the previous year. The hymns from his Sunday service had subsided. Like Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, Kukah is a figure of moral authority in Nigeria – and shares with Tutu a subversive sense of humour in the face of adversity. Kukah’s voice needles the mighty as few others can. The demise of Kaduna’s textile industry had drained the life from the city, he told me, sitting in a sweltering office above his sacristy and dressed in a simple black vestment. ‘We’ve gone backward twenty years,’ he said. ‘Back in the seventies there were textiles, people were energetic. But that generation was not able to produce the young, upwardly mobile elite. That’s what their children should have been.’ Kaduna’s impoverished inhabitants had retreated into their ethnic and religious identities. ‘Kaduna is now a tale of two cities,’ said the priest. ‘This side of the river is Christians; the other is Muslims.’
Kaduna’s decline was only one symptom of Nigeria’s descent into privation, Kukah went on. The national political class had abandoned civic duty to line its own pockets instead. The social fabric had been rent. ‘As a result of the collapse of the state, everybody, from the president down, is trying to find his own power, his own security. People are falling back on vigilante groups.’ Violence had become the tenor of life. ‘Everywhere in the world the ghettoes are combustible. The North is an incubator of poverty.’
The former mill hands among Kukah’s congregation and Kaduna’s Muslims shared in that poverty: buying food, let alone paying school fees that even the dilapidated state-run schools charge, was a daily trial. The mill hands told me they had tried to hold a demonstration outside the state governor’s house, but the police had blocked them. The federal government had repeatedly promised to bail out the industry, yet little assistance had been forthcoming. The more clear-eyed workers realized that, in any case, the game was up. Even if they could get the factories running again, Chinese contraband had so thoroughly captured the market that it would be impossible for the Nigerian operations to compete. And there was something that had accelerated the mill hands’ consignment to the trash can of globalization. Shuffling their feet and looking warily around for anyone who might be eavesdropping, the men murmured a single word: ‘Mangal.’
Alhaji Dahiru Mangal is a businessman whose fortune is thought to run to billions, a confidant of presidents, a devout Muslim, and a philanthropist whose airline transports Nigerian pilgrims to the annual hajj in Mecca. He also ranks among west Africa’s pre-eminent smugglers.
Growing up in Katsina, the last outpost before Nigeria’s frontier with Niger, Mangal received little formal education. More cosmopolitan Nigerian businessmen speak of him with a mixture of snobbery, envy and fear. He got his start as a teenager in the 1980s, following his father into the import-export business, and he swiftly made the cross-border freight routes his own.7 ‘He is shrewd,’ a northern leader who knows him told me. ‘He knows how to make money.’
In the shadier corners of the workshop of the world Mangal found the perfect business partners. ‘The Chinese attacked at the heart of the industry: the wax-print and African-print segment,’ a consultant who has spent years investigating – and trying to reverse – the slow death of Nigerian textiles explained to me. During the 1990s Chinese factories began copying west African designs and opening their own distribution branches in the region. ‘This is 100 percent illicit – but the locals do the smuggling,’ the consultant went on. There are, he said, sixteen factories in China dedicated to churning out textiles with a ‘Made in Nigeria’ badge sewn into them. For a time the Chinese material was of a much lower quality than Nigerian originals, but that gap narrowed as Chinese standards rose. The Chinese began to take control of the market, in league with Nigerian vendors. Mangal acts as the facilitator, the conduit between manufacturer and distributor, managing a shadow economy that includes the border authorities and his political allies. Like many others who profit from the resource curse, he plies the hidden byways of the globalized economy.
Mangal’s network of warehouses and agents stretches to Dubai, the Gulf emirate where much clandestine African business is done, and beyond into China and India. ‘You put it in his warehouse, and
