S2 EP2: The Political Rise of Ken Saro-Wiwa (Part II)

After the Ogoni oil spill disaster Shell caused, Saro-Wiwa set out to tackle this problem. In his capacity as Commissioner for Works, Saro-Wiwa invited the Head of State, Gowon, to visit the site of the disaster. During a two-week nationwide tour of post-Civil War Nigeria, Gowon visited the Niger Delta and Saro-Wiwa organized the youths from the minority ethnic communities to hold peaceful demonstrations before the Head of State. 

By the end of his tour of the Niger Delta, Gowon was compelled to instruct Shell to promise compensation to the affected communities. Gowon also passed the Indigenization Decree which as we discussed in the last episode compelled the foreign oil companies to sell majority of their shares to Nigerian owners. According to Dr. Owens Wiwa, Saro-Wiwa confided that he had made plans to take Shell and the government to court. Suing Shell, and the Government he worked for, would have amounted to political suicide for Saro-Wiwa but at this point, protecting his homeland from destruction by Shell, instead of political alliances, had become his priority. 

1973 began with Saro-Wiwa being more publicly critical than ever of the Nigerian government he was a part of. Increasingly, he served two masters: he was a Government commissioner, and he was also advocating for the autonomy of the Ogoni people over their political and economic affairs. Fresh out of a civil war, Nigeria’s authorities were intolerant of any form of agitation or activism, especially for ethnic autonomy. 

But Saro-Wiwa persisted. He wrote petitions against Shell, and published articles like ‘Genocide in Nigeria: the Ogoni Tragedy’. Through these acts, Saro-Wiwa effectively crossed a line and the government responded in kind. In March 1973, a radio bulletin announced that the Rivers State government had fired Saro-Wiwa.

He was dismissed. He was dismissed in 1973 by the way, because of minority issues. Because he was talking about minority issues. There were tensions in political ideologies under military regimes, advocacy issues. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ve had enough of this person.’

Let’s travel a little bit to a street in Port Harcourt called Aggrey Road. The history of the city’s name ‘Port Harcourt’ goes as far back as 1912, when it was coined by British colonial administrator Frederick Lugard. He named the city in honour of his friend, Lewis Vernon Harcourt, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies. During the colonial era the city grew  around Aggrey Road. Aggrey Road was where the British colonial officers and missionaries lived before independence in 1960, and today you can still see colonial architecture and buildings on the streets. The buildings I saw were often pale and wore a patina of acid-rain grey. They looked like ghosts of the Niger Delta’s  colonial history. 

In the 1970s, Saro-Wiwa opened an office on Aggrey Road. When I travelled to Port Harcourt, I visited Saro-Wiwa’s building, which is now home to the Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation. I met Mr. Dum Syl Aminikpo, the director of the Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation, who told me:

The first time I came to Aggrey Road was on November 9, some years ago. There’s always a vigil here. It’s BIG, It’s like a carnival, it takes up about five to six streets around here… So Port Harcourt started from here. They call it Port Harcourt Township. If you check, it’s a properly mapped area, and what you see, most of the buildings are not actually of the typical Nigerian. I mean, the contemporary style of building that was built mostly by the British. Here was like the hub of the town, where the big boys stayed. So Ken started here. Ken became a commissioner at the age of 24 you know. So he was living here. And here was his office. Here was where he stayed to write most of his books, and Tejuosho street where he stayed. where he operated from. And then the office is somewhere there. It’s locked but here was where Ken operated from in Port Harcourt. It’s still a very busy area. They still have a very active life in Aggrey Road, you know. So it’s, it’s a big street, it’s memorable. At a point it was a no-go area. So when crime was high in Port-Harcourt, Aggrey was a no-go area. 

Today, Aggrey Road is a bustling area of Port-Harcourt. It is lined with shops selling different wares from generators and motor spare parts, to domestic provisions. 

I was only a few minutes into my visit to Saro-Wiwa’s old office on Aggrey Road, when loud gunshots rang out. People began to run, vehicles zoomed off, and the doors and windows of houses and shops lining the road started to close shut. My driver told me: ‘Something is always happening on Aggrey Road,’. 

I later found out that the gunshots belonged to operatives from the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency or NDLEA.  According to people I spoke to once everything had calmed down, NDLEA had been carrying out a sting operation on some drug traffickers who operated out of a base along Aggrey Road. In recent years, Aggrey Road and Port Harcourt more generally has become notorious for drug-related crimes. 

A September 2024 report by ThisDay newspaper highlighted that NDLEA had intercepted an estimated 18,000,000,000 nairaN18 billion in drugs being trafficked through Port Harcourt seaport. I learned from local sources in Port Harcourt that many of the traffickers started out as kids, after being forced to leave their oil-polluted towns and villages in search of better opportunities in Port Harcourt. Standing on Aggrey Road as the situation calmed down and life returned to the streets, I saw people trapped in fear. Writers are often soothsayers and I saw the very future Saro-Wiwa had foreseen more than 30 years ago and had tried to avoid. 

Back in the 1970s, after being fired from his government position, Saro-Wiwa put his savings into starting a business trading goods of all kinds. According to Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Junior:

He was forced into business, which is not something he had any natural appetite for. And he became a moderately successful businessman. And he could have been much more successful because he was close to all of Nigeria’s rulers and the elites at that time and he could have used those advantages but for reasons best known to himself he didn’t. 

Despite his connections to the Nigerian elite; and even though his business was growing; Saro-Wiwa seemed preoccupied with promoting the Ogoni struggle.  

In 1976, after the assassination of Murtala Mohammed by military officer, Buka Suka Dimka, General Olusegun Obasanjo became the head of state. One of the promises Obasanjo made was to continue Murtala’s plan to transition Nigeria to civilian rule. From his office on Aggrey Road, Saro-Wiwa saw an opportunity to take his activism into the political arena. In 1977, he contested in the elections to represent Ogoni in the Rivers State House of Assembly.

In The Politics of Bones, Dr. Owens Wiwa explains that a few months before the elections organized by the Obasanjo regime to usher in a civilian government, Saro-Wiwa was arrested. Dr. Owens Wiwa visited his brother in prison and Saro-Wiwa explained that the arrest was based on false allegations of smuggling whisky filed by his political opponents in the coming elections to smear his reputation. Saro-Wiwa was released the following day when The Police raided his warehouse and found no evidence of smuggled whisky. However, the damage had been done. 

News of Saro-Wiwa’s arrest made headlines across the country. In his memoir, In the Shadow of a Saint, Ken Junior writes that many members of the voting public expressed shock that Saro-Wiwa, the popular columnist and respected businessman, could descend into a life of criminal activity. Saro-Wiwa’s opponents reportedly sent clippings of Saro-Wiwa’s arrest to Obasanjo, and as a result he was disqualified from the electoral race. Ken Jr. recounts that his father went to court after he returned from prison and had his disqualification overturned. Saro-Wiwa then won the local election for the delegate seat, but at the national caucus, he narrowly lost his election to the Constitutional Assembly. 

Saro-Wiwa reportedly lost the election by one vote and did not take the loss well. He insisted that his reputation had been smeared and that the votes had been rigged. Some historians have argued that this loss in particular left him jaded with the Nigerian political establishment and nudged him towards more radical means of advocating for the Ogonis.

So when we wrote the book on Saro-Wiwa by Ohio, it was a very complicated aspect to deal with, because he was full of contradictions. He wasn’t a poor person. People accused him of making money as River state commissioner, you see, and he had…a family in Nigeria, a family outside of Nigeria. He even had children that he was not close to. So moments like that appointment, the money probably accumulated to Abacha became used against him. In other words, his critics never saw him as a saint. He didn’t seem as a saint.

Losing the election changed Saro-Wiwa fundamentally.  

In Ken Junior’s memoir, he described 1977, as ‘the year something died’ in Saro-Wiwa. ‘After he lost the election,’ Ken Junior wrote, ‘he became the critical demanding man that haunted my adolescence.’ Ken Junior’s sister Noo also told me that:  

I definitely remember when I was a teenager, he became, I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, really, but just very mixed. It was his gregarious self sometimes, and then he would become quite moody and preoccupied and talking endlessly about the Niger Delta. I remember that he was obsessed with it, talking about it all the time.

Something may have died in Saro-Wiwa after he lost the election. But that’s only half the story. It was equally the moment a new fight awoke in him. 

Despair. He cursed the earth for spouting oil. Black Gold they called it and he cursed the gods for not drying the oil wells. What did it matter that millions of barrels of oil were mined and exported daily so long as this poor woman wept those tears of despair.

What you’ve just heard is an excerpt from ‘Night Ride’ a short story by Saro-Wiwa which featured in Forest Of Flowers, a short story collection Saro-Wiwa first published in 1986. The passage from the story reflects Saro-Wiwa’s anger at seeing multinational oil companies, like Shell, taking over Ogoni land, polluting it, destroying the people’s means of livelihood, and leaving them with nothing. In the 80s, Saro-Wiwa had quite the literary reputation. Songs in A Time of War, one of his earliest novels was published in 1985 and was popular. That same year, he published Sozaboy which gained both local and international acclaim and would over time be considered one of the best anti-war novels of the 20th century. By 1990, Saro-Wiwa had published three novels, two short story collections, a civil war memoir, four plays and numerous essays. He has also produced the TV Comedy show, Basi and Company. With this oeuvre, Saro-Wiwa’s reputation as one of Nigeria’s best writers was cemented. His readership cut across continents and generations. 

Alexander Sewell is the research and advocacy manager for Stakeholder Democracy Network, a UK and Niger Delta-based NGO dedicated to environmental and climate issues, good governance, and peace and security. When I asked Alexander how he got introduced to Saro-Wiwa’s work, he recalled that:

Actually, as a sort of a young boy, the case with Shell and the Nigerian government was one of the sort of case studies that really sort of caught my attention. Learn about the environmental situation, the Ogoni mobilization, the repressive reaction by the government, and the denial of the oil companies. And it struck me on so many levels, especially the injustice of multinational extractive companies versus peaceful indigenous groups. So yeah, from there, you know, I started reading Ken’s writing as well, Sozaboy in rotten English, you know, like such a beautiful story written from the perspective of somebody at the center of the Civil War, and then the detention diaries…So much, you know, of the beautiful, creative stuff that he produced as well. Just really helped me learn more about the man that was behind this movement. 

Saro-Wiwa’s novel Soza Boy was set during the Nigerian Civil War, and told the story of a young boy, Mene, who joins the Army to impress everyone in his village. His village, Dukana, must decide between joining the new government or staying with the old government. Mene picks the side of the old government and joins their army. But the sheer brutality of the violence Mene witnesses at the war front destroys the very sense of identity he wanted to create for himself. The novel ends with Mene returning to his village after the war with nobody recognizing the violent, soulless man he has become. 

Sozaboy suggested that even in the world of fiction, Saro-Wiwa approached society through the lens of minority rights. Saro-Wiwa also used his personal experience of the civil war to emphasize the importance of non-violence in the Ogoni struggle.

The same year Soza Boy was published, Saro-Wiwa also produced the TV show called Basi and Company. The series ran for five years, from 1985 to 1990. 

Saro-Wiwa produced Basi and Company in Lagos and the show made him become, in many ways, a household name. Basi and company was regarded as a masterclass on satire and highlighted not just the contemporary attitudes of Nigerians at the time, but also the growing culture of corruption in the corridors of power, and how the elite used corporate and political shortcuts in Nigeria to the detriment of the citizens.

To me at least, one of Saro-Wiwa’s most striking creative works is his 1989 satirical short story, Africa Kills Her Sun. The plot revolves around three men who are fed up with the rampant corruption among the ruling elite in their country. In their frustration, the three men turn to crime and join an armed militia. After a failed robbery operation they are arrested. All three men plead guilty and demand to be sentenced to death by firing squad as quickly as possible. Saro-Wiwa wrote the story in the form of a farewell letter one of the arrested robbers, Bana, writes to his girlfriend, Zole, the night before his execution. 

Considering Saro-Wiwa was executed several years later, it’s tempting to regard the story as eerily prophetic. But what makes the story compelling, is Bana’s outlook on Nigeria. ‘In every facet of our lives – in politics, in commerce and in the professions – robbery is the base line,’ Bana writes. Foreseeing his execution, he writes: ‘The priest will pray for our souls. But it’s not us he should be praying for. He should pray for the living, for those whose lives are a daily torment.’   

He drew inspiration from everything around him. If he was reading a book or watching a TV show, he was thinking about how he could produce his own one. If he was travelling on holiday somewhere, he would look at the conditions in that country and how they were so much better than Nigeria’s. And you know, everything around him would feed into his mind and fuel his ambitions, which ran in lots of different directions.

Saro-Wiwa once wrote that ‘the writer cannot be a mere storyteller.’ He felt that writers had a duty to not simply teach or interrogate the problems of societies. Instead, he argued that writers must be actively involved in shaping the present and future of the societies they were in. Even if such writers had to be combative in their approach. For Saro-Wiwa, literature served at least two functions: one, it exposed and questioned the corruption of Nigeria’s leaders and two, it could nurture, embolden and empower the minds of his people. Dr Nabie, Nubari Francis of the Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development in Port Harcourt grew up watching and reading Saro-Wiwa, and told me:

There was, a testimony he gave, he stood up and he gave a submission in one of those days in the court.  He said that he was a man of peace, a man of ideas, and I am quoting him, ‘appealed by the denigrating poverty of his people, who live on the green, economically endowed land, but are distressed by political marginalization and economic strangulation.’ And he put a full stop. And he also said that he was ‘determined to usher into this country a fair and just democracy that will give everyone a valid claim to the same civilization,’ Finally, he said he had devoted and committed his intellect and economic resources,  his very life to a cause in which neither imprisonment or blackmail, that they think he has a moral victory.  Those words were inspiration from the activist to the younger generation. Those words are written in marble. Those words are in my drawer.

Literature and activism worked hand in hand with Saro-Wiwa; and the 80s with all its political and economic turmoil, only reinforced that dynamic. Nigeria entered the 1980s with a civilian government at the helm of affairs. The Shagari and Alex Ekwueme ticket had swept the elections organized by the Obasanjo military regime. These were the elections Saro-Wiwa had contested in to win a seat in the Rivers State House of Assembly and lost. In The Politics of Bones, Dr. Owens Wiwa notes that had Saro-Wiwa won the seat, he would have probably lost it anyway due to the 1983 coup. 

…gross indiscipline, corruption, squandamania, misuse and abuse of public office for self or group aggrandizement which had assumed debilitating proportions in the last few years will be dealt with ruthlessly no matter who may be involved.

On New Year’s Eve 1983, the democratically elected Shagari government was overthrown by General Muhammadu Buhari. Reportedly, this coup had several supporters including IBB, Abacha and a rumoured MKO Abiola.                          

Two years later, on August 27, 1985, IBB led the coup that deposed General Buhari, promising to transition Nigeria to civilian democracy.

I’m pleased to take this opportunity to once again announce , therefore, that this administration attaches the greatest importance to constructive and helpful criticisms, as well as the freedom of the press. And to declare further that the administration also attaches the greatest importance to fundamental human rights.

Saro-Wiwa had known IBB from his days as administrator of Bonny. During the Civil War, IBB and Saro-Wiwa had worked together to bring relief supplies to the displaced residents and refugees of Bonny. Still, Saro-Wiwa was not convinced by IBB’s promise to restore democracy and instead ramped up his criticism of the government in interviews and newspaper columns. 

Then in 1987, IBB personally asked Saro-Wiwa to join his administration as the Executive Director of the Mass Mobilization for Self-Reliance, Social Justice, and Economic Recovery (MAMSER). Despite Saro-Wiwa’s scepticism about IBB, Saro-Wiwa accepted the appointment. He believed that joining the Babangida administration might give him the opportunity to promote the Ogoni struggle from within the system. This approach had backfired in the 1970s during his time in the Rivers State administration, but even the optimist Saro-Wiwa decided to try again under IBB.

The kind of economic situation in Nigeria when Babangida introduced the Structural Adjustment Program, things were very difficult… People were lining up as early as 5:30 for what they call essential commodities, a few tins of milk, maybe sugar and so on. At least if you have the money, you can buy those things. But at the time, you didn’t even have the commodities, even if you had the money. So it was difficult. 

It did not take long for Saro-Wiwa to realize that he had miscalculated and misjudged IBB. As the Executive Director of MAMSER, Saro-Wiwa was tasked with initiating programmes that would tackle issues of corruption, social justice and economic recovery. But he soon realized that none of the programmes he tried to initiate were considered or implemented. Not even those he sent to IBB directly. The final straw for Saro-Wiwa was realizing that IBB was not committed to transitioning to civilian rule. In October 1988, Saro-Wiwa resigned from MAMSER convinced that he needed to advocate the Ogoni struggle in his own way; through a firm, outspoken, and nonviolent Ogoni movement against Shell and the Nigerian Government. He needed to become a full-time activist. 

For us to unpack the origins and evolution of Saro-Wiwa’s activism, we need to first tell the story of a man called Isaac Boro.

The name Isaac Boro is one that is lost in the annals of Nigerian history as we know it today. But it is a name that is tied to some of Nigeria’s most historic events.

Isaac Jasper Adaka Boro was born on September 10 1938 in the town of Oloibiri. As I mentioned in the previous episode, this little known community deep in the mangrove rainforests of present-day Bayelsa State made history in 1956, when it became known as the first place in Nigeria where oil was discovered and drilled.         

On January 15, 1956, Shell D’Arcy, the first Shell company in Nigeria, announced that it had discovered crude oil in commercial quantity in the Niger Delta. At that time, the 18-year-old Isaac Boro was an undergraduate of Chemistry and the Student Union President at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in present-day Enugu State. As the Student Union President, Boro led a peaceful protest against the exploitation of oil and gas resources in the Niger Delta. This protest was the first of its kind in Nigeria. But Boro believed he needed to do more. After seeing firsthand the damage caused by oil spillage, Boro dropped out of university in 1965 to focus on activism. 

According to Dr. Yemi Farounbi, Nigeria’s ex-ambassador to the Philippines and Boro’s schoolmate:

I found him an eloquent speaker, I found him a very intelligent person, I found him a left of the center politician, who subscribed as at that time, like many of us, to the Marxist doctrine. But at the same time he felt bad about his people, because he left the University. He left the University because he could not stand the fact that there was oil spillage in his area.

But just how much importance did oil hold for the fledgling young nation? 

After Nigeria got its independence from Britain in 1960, the country’s new government led by Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa began to shift away from agriculture and towards crude oil. As at independence, agriculture generated 61.65% of Nigeria’s export revenue, while crude oil contributed a meagre 2.1%. By 1980, crude oil accounted for about 90% of Nigeria’s export revenue. 

Here are some views from the 80s that provide more context. They include Onyeka Onwenu, the musician who was a broadcaster at the time, and Chief Samuel Asabia the first Nigerian MD of First Bank. 

We’ve had our independence for twenty years. By Third World standards, we have a well educated elite. We had a productive farming economy. We have minerals, and we discovered a few years ago that we had oil. A lot of oil. Yet today, we are importing food that we should be growing. 

Oil has helped us enormously. I think it has been an unqualified success for Nigeria in many ways. I’m not talking about the management of resources now, I’m talking about what it has done in absolute terms. It’s changed the whole place. It’s changed our own image of ourselves, our image of the external world, everything has changed around us in the last twenty years since we had oil. 

According to Professor Naanen:

Everybody was now looking forward to oil, abandoning farms and so on. The government set the pace. The government was no longer promoting agriculture. Government was no longer promoting local economic initiatives. Everybody became fixated on oil. And so the part of the crisis, the under development, is connected to that neglect, the so-called Dutch disease that the government had.

The Dutch Disease is what economists call a situation where the success of a particular natural resource harms other industries. The term came about in the 1960s, when the Netherlands made a huge gas discovery that created wealth but skewed the country away from its other thriving sectors like manufacturing. 

Across the Atlantic, Boro was witnessing Nigeria’s strain of the Dutch Disease. And as far as he was concerned, oil extraction benefited the government of Nigeria but did little for the people of the Niger Delta.

In late 1965, he formed an armed militia group called the Niger Delta Volunteer Force with his cousin, Nottingham Dick. 

On February 23 1966, months before the Biafran secession attempt, Boro led a secession attempt from Nigeria. In a radio broadcast, copies of which are hard to find today, Boro’s Niger Delta Volunteer Force declared the independence of the Niger Delta Republic. Here’s Tony with a quote from his speech: 

Today is a great day, not only in your lives but also in the history of the Niger Delta. Perhaps, it will be the greatest day in a very long time. This is not because we are going to bring the heavens down, but because we are going to demonstrate to the world what and how we feel about oppression. Remember your 70-year-old grandmother who still farms before she eats; remember also your poverty-stricken people; remember, too, your petroleum which is being pumped out daily from your veins; and then fight for your freedom.

The Aguiyi-Ironsi government responded swiftly. Ojukwu, the military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, was ordered to quell the rebellion, and he immediately attacked Boro’s force. Ironically, a few months later Ojukwu would announce the secession of Biafra from Nigeria. Boro and his men fought against the Nigerian troops for twelve days before being defeated, captured and jailed for treason. 

On July 6, 1967, the eve of the Nigerian Civil War, Boro and his men were granted full amnesty by the Gowon regime. Historians have said that the amnesty might have been a calculated move by Gowon who knew of Boro’s dislike of Ojukwu. Also, though Boro and his men were not trained soldiers of the Nigerian army, they had proven themselves to be capable and experienced at warfare. Unsurprisingly, Boro agreed to join the Nigerian Army in the fight against the Biafrans. Boro believed the independence of the Niger Delta could be best secured from Nigeria and not from Biafra.

On May 9, 1968, Boro’s story came to a fatal end when he was reportedly assassinated by Biafrans in Okrika, an island south of Port Harcourt. After his death, Boro’s men disbanded and his movement came to an end. But it was in his early days as a youth protester that Boro first became known to Saro-Wiwa. In his memoir, On A Darkling Plain, Saro-Wiwa writes: 

The late Isaac Boro of the minority Ijaw ethnic group, ex-policeman, ex-University student, had declared the Niger Delta Republic and had taken up arms against his fatherland. Most people in the South assumed that this was part of the Northern National Alliance coup which had been foiled by the military takeover. It was said openly that the idea was to plant a war of secession in the Niger Delta area, and to use this as a pretext for Sir Abubakar’s government to declare a state of emergency in the East and arrest some NCNC leaders there. However, the coup having happened, Isaac Boro was loath to cancel plans which had taken months to prepare… The Ironsi regime moved in against Boro and quickly captured him before any harm could be done. The Eastern Nigeria High Court tried and sentenced him to death for treason. Ironsi had shown that his regime could maintain law and order. 

Saro-Wiwa observed these events as a fresh graduate based in Lagos, where he held a job at the University of Lagos teaching English. This was the first time Saro-Wiwa had heard of anyone taking up the Niger Delta cause on grounds of minority rights, marginalization, and oil exploitation. And although Saro-Wiwa questioned Boro’s motives, he and Boro were aligned on a few things. 

For one, they both did not like the oil exploitation of their homeland. Secondly, they both chose the side of the Federal Government against the Biafrans. Ultimately, the violent end of Boro’s struggle had a profound influence on Saro-Wiwa, nudging him towards a nonviolent approach to activism many years later. 

Boro, however, was only one of several factors that propelled Saro-Wiwa towards activism.

In his memoir, In the Shadow of A Saint, Ken Junior talks about how by 1990, his father had become dismayed. Saro-Wiwa had written prolifically for ten years about the problems of Ogoniland, but the situation had only worsened. Saro-Wiwa concluded that in a country with a high rate of illiteracy, writers and writing alone could not change or move society. He had to go out and physically mobilize his people. 

One thing that stands out in Saro-Wiwa’s activism is that while he fought for minority rights through the Ogoni cause, he emphasized that the Ogoni sought autonomy over the oil being extracted from their community, and that they had the right to do so as citizens of Nigeria. In order to present the message behind the Ogoni cause to the attention of the Nigerian government, to Nigerians, as well as to the international community, in 1990 Saro-Wiwa drafted the now famous Ogoni Bill of Rights’.

Well, I remember when I was, I think maybe twelve or thirteen, he showed us this book and it was called the Ogoni Bill of Rights. And obviously at that age it meant nothing to me, it was just a very boring political document but he was really passionate about it

In 1990, the Ogoni Bill of Rights was presented to Babangida. If anyone hasn’t read it, I’ll tell you to go and read it. In the Bill of Rights, one of the things they asked for was political autonomy, and they also asked for control of their resources. 

They have done their homework and they have also done their plans for the future of the Ogoni people. It wasn’t a kind of declaration which was long on ideology. It is a kind a ethnic view at an uncomfortable association but based on the principles of justice and also on the unequal distribution of resources of the nation, especially oil.

While oil lay at the heart of the Ogoni struggle, Saro-Wiwa believed that each ethnic group within the Nigerian Federation had the right to self-autonomy in deciding how the government and companies used resources from their land. But this was the kind of rhetoric that would alarm any dictatorship, especially one desperate to have unlimited access to every resource. The novelist and lawyer, Chimeka Garricks, explained this further:

Remember that Nigeria had come from a civil war that ended in 1970 and the Nigerian Government didn’t take kindly, I mean most governments don’t anyway, the Nigerian Government, military government, didn’t take kindly to anything that would be seen as a breakout state. So by asking for political autonomy in the Bill of Rights and asking for control of their resources, the way the Nigerian government would have interpreted it is, these people want to do another Biafra.

Having directly experienced the civil war, the last thing Saro-Wiwa wanted was to repeat it. Instead, he prioritized non-violence, and in the course of his activism, he came to believe that his voice as an intellectual was intertwined with his work as an activist. While his involvement in activism made him a hero to the Ogonis, I wondered what his increased activism meant for his family. 

…he was, you know, he definitely had a sense that they might kill him. And he told me that in a letter. And I was very angry at the time, him saying that. And this was back in 1992. He said that, you know, this campaign that I’m undertaking, they might imprison me and they could even kill me.

I felt that he was scaremongering.I was only 16 at the time, so I thought he was being dramatic, and I was very angry at him for saying things like that. He obviously knew the risks that he was entering into, and yeah, it really consumed him, this whole battle.

Through the years, Saro-Wiwa had gained national prominence at several moments: for joining the Nigerian side as an administrator and speaking against the Biafran cause during the 60s; for advocating against Shell and the environmental degradation of Ogoniland while being a government official in the 70s; for his literature in the 80s. With the 90s, the Ogoni Bill of Rights was only the beginning. 

In fact, the Ogoni Bill of Rights preceded MOSOP. So it was in finding a weapon for actualizing the Ogoni bill of rights that MOSOP was formed, with a very specific mandate to mobilize local and international opinion to campaign for the actualization of that Bill of Rights. And by the end of 1992 it was time for it to become a real social movement, and to pursue the actualization of the mandates as enshrined in the Ogoni Bill of Rights.

In 1990, Saro-Wiwa along with other Ogoni leaders formed the Movement for the Survival of The Ogoni People (MOSOP).   

Actually, he was one of the founding members. We had other Ogoni elites that worked together with him. When MOSOP was formed, he became the spokesperson. 

I should note that in his memoir, Ken Junior wrote that Saro-Wiwa was the actual founder of MOSOP. A belief the MOSOP leader Fegalo Nsuke shared when I spoke with him.

MOSOP, from the beginning, did not have all the affiliates it has today. It started as the Ogoni Central Union and metamorphosed into the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. It was led by Ken Saro-Wiwa. I think the whole idea was Saro-Wiwa’s. 

Founder, founding member, what we can say for sure is that Saro-Wiwa wanted MOSOP to become the vehicle through which the Ogonis could take their concerns into the corridors of power, through the corporate offices of Shell, and into the homes of the public consciousness. 

It was inevitable that Saro-Wiwa would eventually make enemies out of Shell and the government. But Saro-Wiwa soon found out that these were not the only enemies he had made. According to Dr. Owens Wiwa in The Politics of Bones, some members of the Ogoni elite heavily criticized Saro-Wiwa for speaking publicly on behalf of Ogoniland. Dr. Owens Wiwa also mentioned that these critics had joined the Biafran side of the war in the 1960s. They believed that Saro-Wiwa had betrayed them in order to curry favour from the Federal Government. Such critics included Bennett Birabi, Edward Kobani, who was Saro-Wiwa’s childhood friend, and Dr. Garrick Leton. 

The first president of MOSOP was a well known scientist called Garrick Leton. His name was Dr. Garrick Leton. He was a well-known scientist. In fact, he was part of the people who produced weapons for Biafra. 

If Biafra was one end of the bone of contention between Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni elite critics, the other end was the June 12 1993 presidential election organized by the IBB government. 

During the June 12 elections, apart from the fact that MOSOP had said oh, we want political autonomy and all that, they were doing certain things that the government wouldn’t take kindly to. So, for example, during the June 12 elections, they said no elections were going to hold in Ogoniland. As a Nigerian, you can understand how a government would take that.

We have put in our best. We have had sleepless nights. There have been periods of joy, sadness and frustration. There have been periods of satisfaction and sense of fulfillment. There have been periods of dismay and disappointment.. the Interim National Government has followed to ensure.. in fact, they threatened fire and brimstone. They thread the path of confrontation and sometimes treason. They are a small group but they make the most noise like the proverbial empty barrel. 

For Saro-Wiwa, the June 12 election presented an opportunity for the Ogonis to make a bold statement to the IBB regime. The Ogonis, as a people, were going to boycott the election.

I think that what MOSOP simply did there is to tell Nigeria that the Ogoni people were angry. That was the essence of that boycott. Boycotting the election drew the attention of the entire world to Ogoni, because it was something remarkable that in all of Nigeria, Ogoni people could stand to say, we will not participate in this election. And they did not. It made global headlines, and drew attention of the world to the campaign, to the message that the Ogoni people were putting out at that time, and to let the world know that Ogoni people were not happy with the condition that they lived in. It was part of a strategy to gain global attention.

In The Politics of Bones, Dr. Owens Wiwa recalls that in the weeks before the June 12 election, Saro-Wiwa travelled around Europe, meeting environmental rights NGOs and media houses to draw international attention to the Ogoni struggle and their intention to boycott the June 12 election. Saro-Wiwa met with government officials in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Britain, as well as with representatives from the UN Human Rights Commission and the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. 

Saro-Wiwa also appeared on CNN, where he spoke about the boycott. Reports of Saro-Wiwa’s European tour did not sit well with IBB’s government or with Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni critics, some of whom were high-ranking MOSOP members. According to Dr. Owens Wiwa, while Saro-Wiwa was in Europe, the President and Vice-President of MOSOP, Dr. Garrick Leton and Edward Kobani, went on a tour of their own around Ogoniland telling the Ogoni people not to boycott the elections.          

The main person at the front of that movement was Ken Saro-Wiwa. He felt that it was necessary to let the Nigerian Government and people know that Ogoni was not going to vote for, you know, a government that would promise, would commit itself, or hold to a constitution that wasn’t fair to the Ogoni people. And that is why the Ogoni people should boycott the elections… And that itself was the first major test of MOSOP. Because some of the MOSOP leaders were already enmeshed politically.

It is interesting that a social movement created for the welfare of Ogoni people faced its first major opposition from within Ogoni itself. By the early 90s, you could say Saro-Wiwa had made enemies out of the MOSOP members who were politically linked to the federal government. 

By several accounts, they opposed Saro-Wiwa because he had not consulted the MOSOP leadership about his plans to boycott the election before announcing the boycott to the world.

During my research for this podcast, much of the narratives around Saro-Wiwa came across as saintly. Ken Junior’s memoir literally brands him as a saint, while communicating the challenges of growing up as the son of such a revered figure. Following his tensions with high ranking MOSOP members, I wanted to know more about what criticisms, if any, were on record about Saro-Wiwa. 

Ken Saro-Wiwa, as we understand him, was a flawed figure. But he was also a very, very complicated figure, in the sense that this is a man who, you know, came from a, you know, we could say middle class or upper middle class background, you know. Part of the things that his critics, you know, would point out was the fact that he had worked in government, he had had, you know, access to a lot of money and all of these things. But the question that I keep having is, how was somebody like that still able to mobilize masses… Like, what was it about, either the movement or about him, that was able to attract so much support, both from local masses and also the international community?

So in one of his films, one of his less celebrated films, the pioneer African cinema director Sembene Ousmane gave us an answer in the movie called Guelwaar. He set up a protagonist, a flawed character like Saro-Wiwa, who became very famous and eventually succeeded. The theme is around them, aids, especially rice and food from France, in which the people said, if we keep collecting rice from France, we will not be able to feed ourselves. So Sembene set up this leader in a small town who was adulterous, slept with another man’s wife, was caught, and he ran naked from the house of the woman that he had sex with to his own house, naked on the streets. You will see where I’m going, and one of his daughters was a prominent prostitute. When she lost her mother, the leader’s wife, and she came for burial, she came with fellow prostitutes. And people thought this leader would say, okay, how can we be following a leader whose daughter is a prostitute? He himself went to the public and admitted it. He said he knew that his daughter was a prostitute. He was owing people money. But at the end of the day, he led the movement that succeeded. The fact that you have a flawed character does not mean you cannot lead a movement. You have to separate them. You have to separate them. 

Despite his critics, Saro-Wiwa had managed to win the support of most of the MOSOP membership, as well as most of the everyday Ogoni people. As such, many Ogonis stuck with his proposal to boycott the June 12 election. Chimeka Garricks had a compelling way of explaining it. He told me that following Saro-Wiwa’s proposal to boycott June 12, MOSOP had a crisis:

You know, there’s now this whole crisis. So the government is opposed to the Ogoni struggle as it is, right? Within MOSOP there’s an internal dispute within the leadership, of, with some of the founding members of MOSOP.. so there’s now a schism, some kind of schism.

Plus, Professor Ben Naanen who was MOSOP secretary at the time, recalled that:

When this matter came up, it divided MOSOP. Because some of the leaders were high up in the hierarchy. Dr. Leton, for example, was an adviser, one of the key figures for the Social Democratic Party in this part of the country. He was an adviser to Chief Abiola, okay, of the SDP.

One of the things that made the TV show, Game of Thrones, very compelling was its depiction of what happens when a divided house falls. Like House Stark, MOSOP had become divided against itself. Dangerous times loomed on the horizon. And with the decision to boycott the June 12 elections causing a rift among the Ogoni leaders, MOSOP, its members, and the Ogoni struggle, were on thin ice. And sooner or later, the floor was bound to collapse with deadly consequences for the Ogoni people.

From today onwards, Shell is declared persona non grata in Ogoni! 

That was Saro-Wiwa giving a speech to the Ogoni people at a rally in the early 90s. In that brief speech, he essentially banned Shell from Ogoniland to the delight of the large crowd around him.

Saro-Wiwa had come a long way from the Ogoni boy who was born to traders in the village of Bane. That same boy had won scholarships to two of the best educational institutions at secondary and tertiary level where he learned that in the grander Nigerian narrative dictated by the three prominent ethnic groups, his people the Ogonis were being treated like footnotes. It was a narrative he spent the rest of his life trying to correct. 

And as you’ll come to see over the course of this season, in many ways he did correct that narrative. 

Next week on The Republic,  we’re going to zoom out and take a panoramic look at Ogoniland. What and where exactly is Ogoniland? What are these geographic terms we keep using such as Niger Delta? What is the history of the region and, ahead of the Ogoni 9 execution, how has the region evolved over the years especially since the discovery and extraction of oil? What determined the dynamics between local communities, oil companies and the government? And how did these factors drive the suffering of the Ogoni people and the murder of the Ogoni 9? 

You will hear about the controversies surrounding oil extraction in Ogoniland and the Niger Delta by extension. I spoke earlier about Isaac Boro and his Niger Delta force. One thing I’m excited to share with you in the next episode is the Ogonis’ long history of resisting exploitation and the other ways beyond MOSOP through which they protested unchecked oil extraction. 

You will learn about the Federation of Ogoni Women’s Associations (FOWA) and Ogoni women’s resistance. You will also hear from past and present members of MOSOP, some of whom were at the frontline of the Ogoni struggle and worked alongside Saro-Wiwa. Most importantly you will come to understand how the tensions between MOSOP and Shell escalated beyond dialogue  and why the two entities  were unable to reach a peaceful agreement.

Thanks to Aderemi Ojo, Ibrahim Odugbemi and Peace Onafuye for the archival audio you heard on this episode and our overall research. 

You’ll find a full list of the books, articles, and documentaries that we relied on in researching this episode at our website, republic.com.ng/podcasts.

The Republic Podcast is produced by The Republic, a digital media startup based in Lagos, Nigeria; with technical sound engineering by the Voix Collective.  The artwork for the show is by Sarah Kanu with graphic design by Dami Mojid and Wale Lawal. Our script writers are Funbi Akinsanya, Tony Malik and myself Wale Lawal⎈