Executed activist’s Ken Saro-wiwa’s last words were about Shell’s ‘ecological war’

Ogoni heroes of Nigeria must be celebrating oil giant’s comeuppance in SA courts

“I repeat that we all stand before history. I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial and it is as well that it is represented by counsel said to be holding a watching brief. The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come and the lessons learnt here may prove useful to it for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war the company has waged in the delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war duly punished. The crime of the company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished. ”— Ken Saro-wiwa

These words were some of the last uttered by Ken Sarowiwa, an Ogoni environmentalist, playwright, activist and leader of the Ogoni ethnic nationality in Nigeria.

I was the general secretary of the Ogoni people living in Kaduna state in Nigeria during the trial and eventual killing of Saro-wiwa.

I had been part of the struggle of the Ogoni people from when I was 18 as a member of the Ogoni Student Union — one of the nine subunits of Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, which was formed to champion nonviolent resistance against Shell.

Saro-wiwa was able to encapsulate the feelings of the Ogoni through the student movement. The Ogonis have been in pain at the hands of Shell since 1956.

The world did not know that a fair portion of “Nigeria’s” crude oil was literally stolen from one of the smallest indigenous groups in Africa. The Ogoni region is only 1,000km² with a population of 832,000 people in 2006.

Ogoni is the second place where crude oil was discovered in commercial quantities in 1958. Oloibiri was the first, in 1956.

By 1993, when the Ogoni people rose up and declared Shell persona-non-grata, the company and its alliance partners had through a joint venture operation drilled 116 oil wells connected to five flow stations and 12 oilfields.

Nine hundred million barrels of crude oil worth an estimated R170bn had been taken out after 33 years of non-stop extraction.

More than 130km of pipeline encroached violently through hitherto lush and healthy countryside.

When the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) carried out an environmental impact assessment of what Shell had done in Ogoni, its team examined more than 200 contaminated locations, reviewed more than 5,000 medical records and analysed more than 4,000 samples, including water taken from 142 groundwater monitoring wells and soil extracted from 780 boreholes.

The devastation was staggering. UNEP concluded that it would take almost 30 years of remediation work to try to restore the Ogoni environment.

It was discovered that drinking water in parts of Ogoni had benzene contamination that was 900 times higher than the unsafe threshold. Besides the health hazard, the agrarian economy of the Ogonis was destroyed.

Succinctly, Shell’s alliance with Nigerian politics produced one of the worse forms of suppression to have ever happened in Africa.

The non-violent agitations of Ogoni people led to a war being deployed to subdue the truth.

The violence meted out to the Ogoni people has not been adequately captured, neither has anyone been held accountable.

It is against this backdrop that Saro-wiwa wrote that his people had been the victims of an ecological war.

Indeed, Shell has managed to duck from giving account for its actions in Ogoni.

I have been in SA to raise awareness of the plight of the Ogoni people in the hands of Shell and the Nigerian state.

Despite my entrenchment in several social movements and camaraderie with activists, the enormity of the danger of Shell eluded SA civil society groups until Shell showed up on the Wild Coast.

I never knew that a day would come in SA when Shell would be humiliated by the civil society organisations.

I was on my way to Eastern Cape when the decision of the Grahamstown High Court in Makhanda was pronounced in December 2021.

I was still savouring the victory when another court slammed Shell with another damning judgment.

Ogonis believe that nature usually avenges the powerless who lack prowess to defend themselves.

The tears of relief that greeted the series of judgments in SA courts against Shell are the tears of the Ogoni people and of Sarowiwa and his eight comrades, who stepped onto the gallows on November 10 1995.

Today, they must be celebrating the victory against Shell from their unmarked graves together with the people of the Wild Coast, Eastern Cape, all South Africans, Africans and people around the world.

● Barry Wugale’s fiction novel, Niger Delta Command, will launch in District Six on November 10. The novel explores the ideologies of Ken Saro-wiwa. Wugale is an environment and indigenous rights crusader from Ogoni in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. He fled to SA after attempts on his life under the government of Sani Abacha.