Ike Okonta, Lagos
It's nearly 10 years since Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) were hanged on the morning of November 10, 1995. Today, Nigeria faces fresh protests in Saro-Wiwa's stomping ground of the Niger Delta over authoritarian rule and the plunder of the environment by big oil companies. Despite a strategy of state intimidation to suppress the demands of the Ogoni people, the words of Saro-Wiwa live on and are firmly embedded in the political soil of the Niger Delta.
Saro-Wiwa, writer and minority rights activist, beamed a powerful searchlight on the crummy corners of the Nigerian state, illuminating the sordid acts of injustice and oppression that have been visited on the poor and the powerless in the country since it was cobbled together by imperial Britain in 1914.
It was a light that the wealthy and powerful found discomforting; they resolved to extinguish it. Saro-Wiwa was saying things they did not want to hear, even if all of it was true. Even more worrying, he had mobilised his people, the Ogoni people, a small ethnic group in Nigeria's Niger Delta where Royal/Dutch Shell and several other transnational companies had been producing oil for four decades without giving them any of the proceeds, to stand up and insist that enough was enough.
This was in the early 1990s. Saro-Wiwa had written a small pamphlet in 1990 in which he spelled out the grievances of the Ogoni against the Nigerian state and Shell's exploitation of oilfields in the area, devastating the farmlands and fishing rivers of local people. Saro-Wiwa also spelled out how these grievances might be ameliorated, informed by a regime of rights that have been observed only in the breach since the turn of the 20th century. The Ogoni had been reduced to subjects by the British with the advent of colonial rule, an unhappy state of affairs that had been perpetuated by subsequent Nigerian governing elites. The Ogoni wanted to reclaim their rights as citizens.
This pamphlet, which has since attained iconic status in the international environmental and human rights community, is the Ogoni Bill of Rights. A few months after it was published, Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni worthies banded together and established MOSOP, a grassroots political organisation they planned to use as a vehicle to achieve all the demands and goals in the Bill of Rights.
MOSOP was a runaway success from the onset. The organisation was ingeniously structured, tapping into the age-old republican norms of the six federated Ogoni clans and embedding itself in all hamlets, villages, and towns in the Ogoni nation. MOSOP was not just an ethnic movement. It combined the civic and communal, encouraging women, youth, workers' organisations and self-help groups to form their own branches that were then affiliated with the umbrella organisation. Saro-Wiwa was appointed its spokesperson by popular acclaim.
On January 4, 1993, MOSOP and the Ogoni people marked the United Nations day of the world's indigenous peoples with a peaceful march that saw 300,000 children, women and men in the streets of Bori and other Ogoni towns and villages singing songs of protest. The Nigerian subsidiary of Shell was declared persona non grata and its workers were peacefully expelled from the oilfields. The Nigerian military government was asked to account for the US$30 billion worth of oil taken from the Ogoni oilfields since 1958, and to recognise the demand of the people for a measure of political and economic autonomy within the Nigerian federation.
This was the beginning of MOSOP and Saro-Wiwa's travails. Nigeria's political elites had, since the oil boom of the early 1970s, considered the oilfields of the Niger Delta as a private fief, for them to do with as they saw fit. A raft of decrees and laws had been passed taking over the oil-bearing land of local communities in the area and transferring it to the central government in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. Shell and the other oil companies had been encouraged to barge into this land to extract oil without paying adequate compensation to the rightful owners. Billions of dollars had poured into the coffers of the elites and their accomplices in Shell, while the Ogoni, the Ijaw and the other minority groups pined away in poverty and neglect, denied such basic amenities as water, power, roads, schools and hospitals.
Saro-Wiwa threatened this cozy arrangement between Nigeria's corrupt power elite and the oil companies, and they determined to do away with him. Beginning in mid-1993, a special military task force was established by the military government, with the active cooperation of senior Shell Nigeria officials. It initiated a campaign of terror, mayhem and mass murder in Ogoniland. MOSOP supporters were identified, isolated and murdered or maimed. Women were raped. Homes were looted and razed to the ground. In all, 102 Ogoni villages were plundered and their inhabitants either murdered or driven out into the forests.
In May 1994, Saro-Wiwa was arrested by the government on trumped up charges of murder. Several other MOSOP members were detained along with him. After a judicially flawed trial that was widely condemned by human rights groups and opinion leaders worldwide, Saro-Wiwa and eight other MOSOP leaders were hanged in a Nigerian prison on November 10, 1995.
It is 10 years since Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight were murdered in cold blood by the Nigerian military junta and dumped into unmarked graves. Their intent was to remove the writer and activist from political contention in the Niger Delta, and also rid Shell of its most powerful critic. But Saro-Wiwa dead has become even more of a potent force in the burgeoning campaign for minority rights, corporate social responsibility and environmental protection than when he was alive. He has joined the eternal greats beatified by their selfless service to humanity, even at the cost of their lives.
All over the world preparations are being made to mark the 10th anniversary of Saro-Wiwa's passing. Several non-governmental organisations in Nigeria are banding together to establish a writers' resort in memory of the late writer who gave African literature such classics as Soza-boy: A Novel in Rotten English, On a Darkling Plain and A Forest of Flowers. A memorial statute of Saro-Wiwa will be erected in London by a group of environmental and human-rights groups. San Francisco will offer a musical concert and fundraiser on behalf of the Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation, recently established by the late writer's son, Ken Wiwa jnr.
Still, the present Nigerian government, and the oil companies to which it is in hock, are working feverishly to undermine the legacies of this moral and political giant, in the Niger Delta and elsewhere in the country. A fresh wave of communal and civic unrest is sweeping through the delta as youth, women and communal leaders join their counterparts in other parts of the country to demand an end to authoritarian rule and the regime of impunity that has enabled the transnational oil companies to plunder the resources of local people and despoil their environment.
The government took delivery of yet another batch of fast attack boats from the United States in early September and has deployed them to the delta, ostensibly to check the activities of oil smugglers. But local activists say there has been a marked increase in military deployments in the region recently, coinciding with the mass mobilisation of civic and political groups in the delta to oppose the regime's plot to perpetuate itself in office beyond May 2007, when fresh presidential and local elections are due.
Niger Delta leaders walked out of a conference convened by the central government in February to work out a new federal framework and an acceptable formula for sharing the oil revenue when their demand for 20% of oil receipts was rejected. They also refused to back a covert plan that would have enabled Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo to alter the provisions of the constitution and continue in office when his term expires in 2007.
The increased military presence in the region, and the recent spate of detentions of local leaders is Obasanjo's way of retaliating against those in the region he now characterises as "subversive elements". It is, however, unlikely, that these strong-arm methods will suppress the clamour for democratic accountability, self-representation and proper consideration for the environment in the region. Saro-Wiwa was hanged in order that Shell might return to its oil wells in Ogoniland. But the Ogoni have refused to back down, and the oil company is still persona non grata in the area 12 years after it was peacefully expelled. The present wave of military intimidation will not achieve the result Nigeria's authoritarian leaders desire: unchecked plunder of the oil wealth of the delta's communities.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was a writer and a man of ideas. He believed that the written word was potent, and that good ideas would endure no matter the travails and obstacles placed on their path. Saro-Wiwa was right. Ten years after he was brutally cut down, his word and ideas are as potent as when he first uttered them in the early 1990s.
[From Pambazuka News (<http://www.pambazuka.org>). Dr Ike Okonta is a junior research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. He is co-author of Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil (Verso: London, 2003). He writes a weekly column for the Lagos daily, This Day. Visit <http://www.remembersarowiwa.com>.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 2, 2005.
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