By Bamidele Ademola-Olateju
A people who do not put a name on what their hands have made will one day pay another man to wear it back to them. I stand this morning wrapped in Akwete — maroon, turquoise, and gold, woven on an upright loom by hands in Abia State that have carried this craft from mother to daughter for over a century. I did not choose it as costume. I chose it as argument. Because last week, Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, stood in Akwete town and did something no First Lady has done before her: she went in person to the weavers, and she put ₦2 billion behind their looms. She called Akwete “a priceless national heritage” and told the nation plainly, Akwete belongs to all of us, not just to Abia, not just to the Igbo. She is right. And she has handed us an opening we must not waste. Money alone does not build an industry. Money builds a shed, a loom, a training center, for a season. What outlasts the money is the law that decides who is allowed to call a thing by its name. That law exists. It is called Geographic Indication protection, and Nigeria has barely touched it.
A Geographic Indication, or GI, is a legal mark that ties a product’s name to the place and the people who made it famous. Champagne is not merely sparkling wine, no bottle may bear that name unless it comes from that region of France, made in that method, by producers registered to that name. Roquefort cheese, Darjeeling tea, Scotch whisky, all protected the same way. The law does not just decorate the product with prestige. It builds a wall around the value. It says: this name is not for sale to whoever can print it on a label in a factory in another country. It belongs to the community whose skill made it worth naming.This is exactly what Aṣọ-Oke, Akwete, and every other indigenous Nigerian textile need, and do not yet have. Today, nothing stops a mill in Guangzhou or Surat from mass-printing a “kente-style” or “Aṣọ-Oke-style” fabric and selling it back into Lagos markets at half the price of the handwoven original, while the weaver who trained for years on an upright loom watches her market shrink. Without GI registration, “Akwete” is just a word. Anyone can put it on a label. Anyone can profit from the name while the women of Akwete Ndoki receive none of it. With GI registration, “Akwete” becomes property — collective, communal property, and to counterfeit it becomes an offense with teeth, prosecutable at home and, through international trademark frameworks, contestable abroad.This is the second half of what Mrs Tinubu’s ₦2 billion must build. Not only looms, but law. Abia State, working with the Federal Ministry of Trade and the Nigerian Copyright Commission, should move now to register Akwete as a protected geographic indication, the way Nigeria has begun, too slowly, with Aṣọ-Oke and adire. Every weaving town; Akwete, Iseyin, Ijebu-Ode, Abeokuta should have its name locked in law before it is stolen in commerce. A weaver in Iseyin should own the word “Aṣọ-Oke” the way a vintner in Champagne owns his.
As we build that legal wall at home, let us not fail to honor those who have already carried these fabrics past every border. Imane Ayissi, the Cameroonian couturier who fought for twenty-eight years before becoming the first sub-Saharan designer admitted to the Paris Haute Couture calendar, has put Akwete on runways beside Lyon silk and Italian wool, insisting to a Western fashion establishment that African cloth belongs in the same room as anything from Milan or Paris. He has said it himself, that as long as Africa ships out its raw materials and buys back the finished product at a price few Africans can afford, the continent will keep losing what it made with its own hands. That is not just fashion philosophy. That is the exact wound GI protection is built to close. Every hand that touches Akwete, every mill that copies Aṣọ-Oke, every runway that borrows our patterns leaves a mark on the ledger of who profits and who is left behind. The question before us is only whether that ledger enriches Akwete Ndoki and Iseyin or robs them a second time. Her Excellency Remi Tinubu has given Akwete a season of silver. It falls to policy, and to all of us who wear this cloth and write of it, to give it the name the law will guard long after the money is spent.