Wear Nigeria Campaign: Creative economy is the next oil, says Austin Aimakhu 

At the 2024 ‘Wear Nigeria’ three day campaign, the founder of the initiative, Austin Aimakhu, has urged government and private bodies to support the creative sector, particularly, the traditional textile industry.

Aimakhu made this call during the event held in Lagos recently. According to him, enough is not being done to grow the Nigerian textile tradition industry.

He said: “The creative economy is a huge sector as cultural expressions are so critical. We need to go big on converting cultural expressions to money, which has been done to a large extent in our music industry and our Nollywood. So, we need to introduce conscious policy interventions and efforts to develop this area. The creative economy could be the next oil if we have appropriate policies.”

He continued: The Nigeria textile tradition is a critical sub-sector in the fashion ecosystem. We need government policies intervention in this sector to make it happen; we need technology, financing, education to be able to develop our Nigerian textile tradition. Wear Nigeria is basically the Nigerian textile tradition, aso oke, adire, Igbulu, akwete, akwa ocha and different types of other wool and prints that are indigenous to us in Nigeria. This sector is a means of empowerment that is being overlooked.

“The sector employs a lot of young people and women. It starts with intervening in the lives of these people, assisting them in what they need to grow such as technology, finance and other forms of policy intervention by the government to help them develop. Government has to come on board as this is a way of empowerment, developing our textile industry and our GDP. So I call for a national policy on the Nigeria textile industry.”

Also speaking, Partner, Wear Nigeria and CEO First Catalyst, Soji Odedina, “Nigeria is in a dire state right now and unless we look inwards, begin to patronise what belongs to us we probably would not get out of the hood. We must embrace a proudly Nigerian idea and concept. This is where the Wear Nigeria emanated. Music and Nollywood are in the frontiers, why not our fashion? This is a foreign exchange annex for Nigeria, for people all over the world to wear Nigeria. So the idea is to stabilise Wear Nigeria here with appropriate policy intervention and push our fabrics to the global stage.”

He also addressed the challenges of China duplicating Nigerian fabrics, he said, “this is a huge problem because anything the Chinese touches goes out of your hands. An example is Vlisco, a textile company that makes Hollandis and brings to Nigeria, and the Chinese started making copy materials and sending it to the market to sell at 20 times cheaper than the original from Holland, and Vlisco left Nigeria.