"WHEN THE FACTORIES FELL SILENT: Nigeria’s Lost Industries and the Cry of a Jobless Generation”
BY NWOKWU SOLOMON CHUKWUEMEKA T here was a time in this country when the sound of machines was the heartbeat of our cities. From Kaduna to Aba, from Kano to Lagos, factories did not sleep. They roared. They breathed life into homes. They fed families. They gave young men and women a reason to wake up with pride. Today, those machines are silent. Their silence is not just mechanical—it is symbolic. It is the silence of abandoned dreams. The silence of graduates roaming the streets with certificates that have become mere paper. The silence of a nation that once produced, but now consumes what it does not understand how to make. We have become a marketplace for the world—a dumping ground where substandard goods find a second life, while our own industries are buried without a funeral. And the most painful part? This did not happen overnight. It was not a sudden collapse. It was a slow, deliberate suffocation. A currency that lied about its strength while killing local production. A power ...