KEN SARO WIWA: A NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER.
It was in November of 1995, precisely the 10th. Every Ogoni person my age could remember that day like it was yesterday. It was a day that the entire Ogoni was thrown into hellscape. I know where I was that fateful day and how I felt upon hearing the news of the murder of Ken Saro Wiwa and eight of his Ogoni compatriots. It felt like my world collapsed as the news of the death filtered in and as the Ogonis mourned their dead so did nature: the weather was gloomy with no sun shine.
Shell came into Ogoni land in the late 1950s and since then the peoples' lives have been turned around; Ogoni could be passed for another Hiroshima with the destruction of lands from oil spills as a result of old explorations from over thirty decades of dirty oil business.
From the beginning Nigeria had agriculture as the mainstay of the economy, the North planted groundnuts, the Yoruba had Cocoa and the Ibo in the South East had palm oil. The revenues from the sales of these products did not in any way benefit the Ogoni people and other Minority tribes in Nigeria. When oil was discovered in Nigeria, precisely in the Niger Delta in the middle of the 1950s, farming was abandoned and the system that operated before then was jettisoned. Awo did use the wealth from the Cocoa sales for the education of the Yoruba people and yes, he did call for equal sharing rights for the entire Nation's tribes. This was the idea that Ken Saro Wiwa frowned upon and spent his time and energy in futile attempts to draw the attentions of the Nigeria government to the plight of the oil producing areas and instead drew a blank rejection from the powers that be.
So, in pacifying us, a paltry 13% derivation was meant for the oil producing areas, money that does not even get to the people on whose land the oil is found. According to Ken Saro Wiwa, this is like someone stealing your shirt and then turned around and gave you a button of it. And to some people from the North, this 13% is even too liberal that they want to revisit it and slash it, making it that some of it would go to them, then and then they will be satisfied, forgetting about the farming days where groundnuts, cocoa and palm oil reigned and when it was a 50/50 sharing formula.
In 1993, the Ogoni people gave shell and the Nigerian State an ultimatum after they had failed to address the Ogoni Bill of rights which had been given them. The Ogoni bill of rights called for an adequate share (resources control) of the proceeds from the oil for the development of Ogoni and political autonomy for the Ogoni people among many other things in the Ogoni Bill of rights. Somehow Shell and the Nigeria may have thought that the Ogoni People did not have the nerve or were boneless to dare them to leave Ogoni. Finally, they met their match in the person of Ken Saro Wiwa and the Ogoni People. Ogoni, having produced and contributed enormously to the upkeep of Nigeria does not have electricity, water, hospital, or fire station given sensitive oil installations. Ogoni does not even not have a decent school. These are essential things that even prisoners are entitled and have access to.
The Ogoni People led by their great leader, Ken Saro Wiwa refused to the maxim that oil is the devil's excrement which means that wherever oil is found is bound to be ignored and thrown into a perpetual ruin. Ken believed that it was time for the Nigerian State and Shell to be wise and do the right thing. When that failed Shell was kicked out of Ogoni for good in 1993. Being angered by the ouster of Shell and the potential damage that could do to their profit margin, the Ogoni leaders were casted as unpatriotic secessionists. Mosop's most brazen act at least in the eyes of the Abacha Government was the printing of an Ogoni flag, writing of an Ogoni anthem and a boy cut of the National election of June, 1993, which Chief MKO Abiola presumably won.
Sitting atop a sea of oil, Ogoni people are mired in misery beyond words, while people from the Majority tribes are benefitting immensely from it. Alhaji Aliko Dangote is worth a whopping $20.5 billion according to the Celebrity Net worth, which earned him the title as the richest person in Africa because of the Niger Delta oil. He owns a conglomerate of companies. Aliko Dangote controls much of Nigeria commodities trades. Mike Adenuga is another person whose net worth is from the oil from the Niger Delta. Mike Adenuga is worth $4.7 billion, all from oil. And while the Ogoni people are mired in abject poverty,
there are people who are actually benefiting from our sufferings.
Abuja is the capital of Nigeria after Lagos. Abuja was built with petro dollars. Abuja is a modern city in Nigeria built with comfort and convenience in mind. The Question then is: how many Ogoni person has a home in this city built with their own money. Abuja was not built with any Ogoni person in mind. The scale of justice here is out of balance. This is why Saro Wiwa was murdered to get him out of the way for free flow oil and money. The Petroleum Trust Fund has not benefitted an Ogoni man either: How many Ogoni people have got any scholarship on this program. Even the NDCC which was and still an offshoot of Mosop and the struggle of the Ogoni People has not benefitted the Ogoni People. Obasanjo, said since the Ogoni people kicked shell out, there was no need for them to benefit from any development in the Delta and the country. Can someone tell him that before shell was ousted from Ogoni, there had been billions of dollars' worth of oil stolen from Ogoni and the Niger Delta. Nigeria still owes Ogoni people royalties from oil explorations for more than three decades of business. This is an issue that the leadership of Mosop should press the Nigeria State and press it hard.
Ogoni should have been like Dubia and other gulf states from its oil, Ogoni people should have had no reason not to be happy, wealthy and content with their wealth but what trickled down to them is the destruction of their ecosystem, pockmarked jungles, industrial waste and toxic pollution: this is an unconventional extermination of a people.
No one needs to go deep into Ogoni to see the misery and poverty prowling everywhere. A drive from Port Harcourt or from Eleme heading to Bori or Gokana and a look at the faces of the people walking some fifty miles to and from their farm lands and sometimes on empty stomach, burning perhaps more than 3050 calories a day with nothing to replenish the spent up calories with. Thirst and hunger is not new to an Ogoni person in the mist of plenty. I saw a picture of a dead Ogoni woman on face book and the casket bought by her son for burial and I wondered when she actually died. I told myself that this person had been dead a long time ago before her burial. In Ogoni, we die twice. From the time we are born until the time we are tired of dying alive and then we are buried. Everyone is Ogoni is a walking dead. We are victims of creative sufferings.
It has been more than two years since the UNEP report, which vindicated Saro Wiwa and the Ogoni peoples' claims about the destruction of the entire Ogoni land. The reporting was a scathing indictment of Shell and the Nigerian States. According to the reports, Ogoni has wider extension of contamination of the air, land, vegetation, ground and surface water. The People can't plant due to carpets of oil on their lands; water tables are dried up due to gas flares. Instead of implementing the UNEP report, Jonathan set up a sham substitue in the name of HYBRED. The question is: what is wrong with the UNEP report and or what did Jonathan not understand about the UNEP report? Jonathan is a Deltan, and should be expected to act and act quick for the suffering people of the Niger Delta but had been dormant as President. Obviously, Jonathan's Presidency has it origin from Mosop and the Ogoni People. When Obasanjo realized the avalanche of the task of compensating the people or to make rights the many wrongs that have been done to them, decided that the cheap and easy fix was to have a person who was from the Delta to be President of Nigeria, but that person had failed woefully. Looking back now one could say that Obasnajo had done more for the people of Niger Delta than any other President in the history of Nigeria.
While the Ogoni people celebrate November, 10th, every year as their heroes' day. The event of 1995 cannot be washed away from their memory in a flash. It was a black day for the Ogoni people, and though Shell and the Nigerian Government may have thought that have defeated us, they have knocked us down but not knocked out. We will fight with the last drop of our blood until Ogoni is out of the shackles of slavery and also exonerate the innocent name Ken Saro Wiwa and eight of his kinsmen.
Toate Ganago is a Pastor from Ogoni.