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