A glass industry for the North-East: Six governors, one fund

The North-East does not make a single bottle. Every soft drink or cough syrup sold in Maiduguri, Damaturu, Gombe, Yola, Bauchi or Jalingo was blown more than a thousand kilometres away, in Agbara, Ogun State, or Ughelli, Delta State. The window glass in our new hospitals, hotels and plazas travelled further still. It came by sea from China, which supplies more than nine of every 10 sheets of flat glass sold in Nigeria.

Yet the ingredients are under our feet. Glass is made from three things: silica sand, soda ash and limestone. Yobe State has all three. Its sand and quartz appear on the National Bureau of Statistics’ list of the state’s industrial minerals. Its limestone belt in Fika, Fune and Gulani is the same formation that feeds the cement works across the Gombe border. And beneath the Lake Chad Basin in Yobe and Borno lies trona, the mineral from which soda ash is refined. Nigeria imports almost all the soda ash its factories use, an estimated 180,000 tonnes a year, while sitting on deposits that Nigerian researchers have shown melt into glass as well as the imported product. A soda ash plant at Yusufari was announced in 2001. It was never built.

We have been selling sand and buying bottles for 30 years. The region ships its raw materials out as nothing and brings the finished product back at full price. That is not geography. It is a choice.

The market is not in doubt. Beta Glass, the country’s only large glass maker, grew its revenue by 27 per cent to N149 billion in 2025 and more than doubled its profit to N33.5 billion, selling almost everything it made inside Nigeria. Helios, one of Africa’s largest private equity funds, has just paid up to 100 million euros for it. Nigeria’s container-glass market has been growing about six per cent a year, twice the pace of the wider packaging industry. Not one tonne of that glass is made in the nineteen northern states, which hold half the country’s people.

So why has nobody built a furnace in the north? Because no single north-eastern state can comfortably carry one. A container glass plant of 150 to 200 tonnes a day, with its own sand quarry, a trona refinery and the captive power station that Yobe’s weak grid makes unavoidable, costs in the region of 70 million to 110 million dollars. A float glass line for windows costs two to three times more. A furnace, once lit, runs day and night for twelve to fifteen years. These are not projects for a state budget squeezed between salaries, security and roads. They are projects for patient, pooled capital.

The six governors should pool it. I am calling on the North-East Governors’ Forum to establish a North-East Industrial Pool Fund and to make a regional glass industry its first investment.

The model is not exotic. The 19 northern states already co-own the New Nigeria Development Company. The north-east already has a Development Commission with a federal mandate. The Yobe Mining Development Company has commissioned feasibility studies on limestone, gypsum and trona and is talking to the Islamic Development Bank, the African Development Bank, Afreximbank and the Bank of Industry. What is missing is not a study or a lender. It is a sponsor with enough weight to anchor a 100-million-dollar plant, and six states have that weight where one does not.

The arithmetic is simple. If each state commits the equivalent of N5 billion a year for three years, in land, mineral rights, infrastructure and cash, the pool holds about N90 billion, or roughly 60 million dollars. That is enough equity to attract a strategic operator, whether Helios-owned Beta Glass, China Glass Holdings, which already holds World Bank guarantees for a float plant in Ogun, or one of the Indian and Turkish groups eyeing the Sahel. It is enough to unlock development-bank debt for the balance. And it tells lenders that a region stands behind the plant, not one administration that may change its mind in 2027.

Each state brings what the others lack. Yobe brings the sand, the trona and the limestone. Borno brings the largest market in the sub-region and the trade routes into Chad and Cameroon. Gombe brings a working cement industry and the skills that come with it. Adamawa brings the Yola electricity distribution company and an engineering tradition. Bauchi brings dolomite and feldspar, the minor ingredients every glass batch needs. Taraba brings water and a corridor to the Middle Belt. A pooled fund turns six half-hands into one full one.

The gains run well beyond the factory gate. A plant of this size employs 400 to 700 people directly and thousands more in quarrying, soda ash, haulage and glass recycling. Soda ash alone has a national market in detergents, textiles and water treatment that would make the refinery profitable before the first bottle is blown. For a region trying to turn the page on 15 years of insurgency, a working furnace is also a statement: that the north-east builds things, and that its young people have somewhere to go in the morning other than the motor park.

The risks are real, and they should be named. The sand must be drilled and assayed before anyone orders a furnace, and the first plant should make bottles, which forgive iron in the sand, before it attempts window glass, which does not. Energy must come by road as liquefied natural gas, with a captive power station, until a spur from the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano pipeline reaches us. Security along the Potiskum-Damaturu corridor must be planned with the military, and political-risk cover of the kind MIGA gave the Ogun plant should be in place from day one. None of these is a reason to wait. Each is a reason to do the feasibility study properly, and a pooled fund can pay for a proper one.

The governors meet often. They have issued many communiqués on security and the allocation formula. I would ask them to issue one more, with a number in it: a North-East Industrial Pool Fund, a glass plant in Yobe as its first project, a feasibility study commissioned within 90 days, and first bottles within three years. Let the governors diversify the economy, create jobs and leave a legacy they can be proud of. The sand has waited long enough.

Join Daily Trust WhatsApp Community For Quick Access To News and Happenings Around You.