| | Between the force of structural adjustment and the general weight of Afro-pessimism, it is usually assumed today that studies in African political economy and especially studies of modern industry and industrial workers can only be told in an atmosphere of unrelieved gloom. This full-length study of trade union activity in a major Nigerian industry by Andrae and Beckman, authors of The Wheat Trap, makes an important and thought-provoking contrast. The Nigerian textile industry, which at peak employed as many as 100,000 workers, did indeed enter a serious period of decline at the end of the oil rush of the 1970s, a phase I documented in a short study for this review some twenty years ago. However, with some state support and aided by the devaluation of the naira, it stabilised and even recovered in the Babangida era. Capacity utilisation, which may have fallen to 30%, rose again to perhaps 70% while linkages to the Nigerian cotton crop increased. |
