Immortalize Isa Funtua, Textile Manufacturers Association Tells CBN

The Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association (NTMA) in a statement issued on Friday by its director-general, Alhaji Hamma Kwajaffa, are pushing for a way to honor the late Mallam Isa Funtua, who died on Monday.

Kwajaffa said Mallam Funtua was dedicated to the revival of the textile industry through his engagement with the CBN and other stakeholders in ensuring the actualisation of the cotton-textile-garment revival programme of the government.

In view of this, The governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr Godwin Emefiele, has been urged to immortalise the late Mallam Isa Funtua by implementing the CBN’s textile revival programme.

“Mallam Isa Funtua had been a great pillar in ensuring that the textile industry is back on its feet. He had worked tirelessly to see that the industry is revived and even better than its heyday when the textile industry employed over 500,000 workers and about one million in the cotton sector. The whole value chain employed two million Nigerians around that time in the 1960s and 1970s”, Kwajaffa’s statement read.

The NTMA Director General said that the best way to immortalise the memory of the industrialist is to ensure that the programme is properly implemented.

Founding Managing Director of Democrat Newspaper and former President of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), Mallam Ismaila Isa Funtua, died of cardiac arrest Monday night.

Funtua is considered part of the most powerful clique of official and unofficial power brokers around President Muhammadu Buhari known as ‘The Cabal’.

His death follows powerful member of the ‘Cabal’, Abba Kyari’s demise. Kyari was the former Chief of Staff to President Buhari.
He was life patron of Newspaper’s Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) and Chairman of Bulet Construcion company.

He was buried according to Islamic rites on Tuesday.