Nigeria, Feb. 17 -- A country's soul can be glimpsed in the humming of its factories and measured rhythm of its machines. In China, for instance, we've seen how mass industrialization rewrote the story of a country with crawling economy into a country with the second biggest nominal GDP in the world. Here in Nigeria, in the 1970s and 1980s, our textile sector was exactly that sort of place where hope was knitted into the fabric of national enterprise, where over 180 textile mills spun dreams into reality while employing hundreds of thousands of direct labourers and supporting millions of cotton farmers, tailors, traders and families.

Contrastingly, today, many of us walk through the markets of Lagos, Kano, Onitsha and Abuja and see shel...