The Senate on Tuesday appealed to the Federal Government to ban the importation of textiles for a period of five years to allow to produce local textiles. This followed the debate on a motion sponsored by Senator Kabir Barkiya (APC-Katsina Central) during the plenary session on “Urgent need to revamp the nation’ s comatose textile industry”. The upper chamber also appealed to the Federal Government to provide the necessary infrastructural facilities especially power supply to local textile manufacturing companies to revamp the industry. It also called on the government to encourage local textile manufacturing companies by providing them with soft loans and easy access to credit facilities through the Bank of Industry. Barkiya noted that the textile industry played a significant role in the manufacturing sector of the Nigerian economy with a record of over 140 companies in the 1960 s and 1970 s. “The textile industry recorded an annual growth of 67 percent and as of 1991, employed above 25 percent of the workers in the manufacturing sector. The textile industry was then the highest employer of labor apart from the civil service.” He noted that the industry had witnessed a massive decline in the last two decades with many textile companies such as Kaduna Textile, Kano Textile, and Aba Textile closing shop and throwing their workers into the job market. Contributing, Senator Robert Boroffice (APC-Ondo North) said that the importation of textile materials was as a result of the comatose textile industry.