He was a successful schmoozer, able to drink like a fish. But Stolper’s ideas carried unusual weight. This was not a popular view among his fellow planners. “Any industry which required high duties impoverished the country and wasn’t worth having,” he believed. He concluded that Nigeria was not yet ready for large-scale industry. “African labour is the worst paid and most expensive in the world,” Stolper complained. Those who stayed were often too tired, inexperienced or ill-educated to maintain the machines properly. Many quit, adding to the cost of finding and training replacements. Some employees walked ten miles to work, others carried the hopes of mendicant relatives on their backs. Skilled labour was scarce: the mill had found only six northerners worth training as foremen (three failed, two were “so-so”, one was “superb”). ![]() ![]() And yet it required a 90% tariff to compete. In this bleak commercial landscape one strange flower bloomed: Kaduna Textile Mills, built by a Lancashire firm a few years before, employed 1,400 people paid as little as £4.80 ($6.36) a day in today’s prices. IN AUGUST 1960 Wolfgang Stolper, an American economist working for Nigeria’s development ministry, embarked on a tour of the country’s poor northern region, a land of “dirt and dignity”, long ruled by conservative emirs and “second-rate British civil servants who didn’t like business”.
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