S2 EP4: The Kangaroo Court

It’s been a long ride, so let’s do a quick recap of what we’ve talked about so far. In the first episode, we shared some background, covering what Nigeria was like under General Sani Abacha’s draconian rule, and the political contexts Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogonis faced in the 90s. 

In episode two, we took you back to Saro-Wiwa’s childhood, tracing the evolution of his political consciousness. Then, in episode three, we explored the geography, history and politics of the Niger Delta, painting a necessary backdrop of how the arrival of oil companies and the discovery of oil in the 1950s changed the dynamics between local Niger Delta communities and the government. The episode ended with Saro-Wiwa being blamed for the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. 

In this week’s episode, we’re going to discuss how these unfounded claims set the stage for the arrest and trial of Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogoni activists. But first, what were the events that led to the arrest of Saro-Wiwa and other members of MOSOP in May 1994?

On 19 January 1994, General Abacha, who had been Nigeria’s Head of State for just two months, sent a Federal Ministerial Committee to Ogoniland to meet with Saro-Wiwa in his hometown of Bori. The primary mission of the committee was to investigate the oil crisis in the Niger Delta region and make a report on how to solve the crisis. The committee consisted of Alex Ibru, the federal minister of internal affairs; Chief Donald Etiebet, the minister of petroleum resources; Melford Okilo, the minister of tourism and commerce; and Lieutenant Colonel Dauda Musa Komo, the military governor of Rivers State. 

Ibru, the publisher of The Guardian, one of Nigeria’s most influential newspapers at that time, was a close friend of Saro-Wiwa. Due to his friendship with Saro-Wiwa, The Guardian had given MOSOP a lot of positive coverage and publicity in the news. Saro-Wiwa imagined that with Ibru on the tour, the Ogoni cause would get the seriousness of their struggle conveyed to the country, and to Abacha. However, Lieutenant Colonel Komo who acted as the official escort and guide of the Committee, saw the tour as an opportunity to impress Abacha and show his superiors in Abuja that he had Saro-Wiwa and the Ogonis under his control. With such differing goals between Saro-Wiwa and Lieutenant Komo, you can already see the collision that was bound to happen.

Hello and welcome to The Republic, a podcast about pivotal African figures and historical events. I’m your host, Wale Lawal. In seven episodes, I’m going to walk you through one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Nigeria’s history: the Abacha regime’s execution of the Ogoni 9 in 1995. In this episode, we will take a closer look at the events that led to the 1994 arrest and trial of Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists. We will talk about how these men came to be known as the ‘Ogoni 9’, the verdict of their trial, and the reaction of the International media and leading figures of the international community to the verdict of Abacha’s tribunal. 

I’m currently standing on the premises of the Ken Saro-Wiwa Memorial Park in Bane, the village of the Saro-Wiwa family, in the town of Bori, Rivers State. In front of me is Saro-Wiwa’s mausoleum. Carved into a wall of the mausoleum is the title of Saro-Wiwa’s short story, Africa Kills Her Sun. The mausoleum sits on a hill overlooking the rainforests of Bane, and above the mausoleum is a towering statue of Saro-Wiwa with his fist raised to the sky. Bori is the second largest city in Rivers State after Port-Harcourt. According to the 2006 Nigerian census, the Ogoni population is close to 832,000 people, and Bori alone hosts an estimated 250,000 Ogonis. 

The Ogoni are a fishing and farming people. They have lived in the very fertile area that produced most of the food that was eaten in the Delta proper. 

Here in Bori, in the heart of Ogoniland, the events that would end in the arrest of Saro-Wiwa were set in motion. Arriving in the Niger Delta on that hot day of January, 1994, Abacha’s ministerial committee made its way to Bori. Here, the committee met a massive crowd of Ogonis. The Ogonis held placards demanding their rights, protesting against Shell, and accusing the military government and its ministerial representatives of injustice. 

We want freedom! We want freedom! We want freedom! We want freedom! We want freedom! Freedooommmm!!! 

Komo, the military governor of Rivers State, wore military camouflage and a feathered beret. He took the microphone to address the crowd and began to stutter. 

We want to, we appealed the last time, and I’m still appealing now, that most of the demands of various communities, including yours, can be made by the government, but that can only be made if there is a climate of peace, and fear and suspicions are removed from our mind. 

Komo called on the Ogoni people to remove suspicions from their minds and believe that only the Abacha military government could meet their demands. He urged the Ogoni people to change their behavior and correct the world’s impression that the Ogoni struggle was synonymous with violence. Big mistake. In trying to gaslight the Ogoni people, Komo annoyed them even more and they booed him into silence. 

NO TO SHELL! NO TO SHELL!!

Komo then handed the microphone to Saro-Wiwa and immediately the crowd ignited with shouts of support and excitement. Komo and the representatives of Abacha’s government now saw firsthand the messianic charisma and reputation that Saro-Wiwa had with the Ogoni people.

On behalf of the entire Ogoniland, its chiefs, people, and spirits, and on behalf of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP, I say welcome to our SHELL-shocked land. 

In his speech, Saro-Wiwa criticized Shell for trying to deflect the blame for the oil pollution to the federal government. The thunderous ovation Saro-Wiwa received from the crowd, and the contempt they meted out to Shell and the government representatives made Komo’s head hot with anger. Shortly after the ministerial committee left Port-Harcourt, Komo, in his rage and embarrassment, created the Rivers State Internal Security Task Force or RSIS. Major Paul Okuntimo was placed in charge of the task force and through him, Komo launched his full assault on Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people. Komo gave Okuntimo one assignment: to provoke the Ogonis until there was a solid reason to subject Saro-Wiwa and the Ogonis to the authority of the Task Force. 

The stage was now set for a major confrontation to explode between the Ogoni people and security forces of Abacha’s government. On a quiet, cloudy morning in May 1994, a peaceful protest in Ogoni erupted into violence. By the time the dust settled, four prominent Ogoni chiefs had been murdered in cold blood. I spoke about this briefly in the last episode: The four Ogoni elders were reported to have been hacked to death by a mob, during a meeting at the palace of His Royal Highness, Chief James Bagia, ’the Gbenemene of Gokana’. The four Ogoni elders were: Albert Badey, Edward Kobani, Samuel Orage, and Theophilus Orage. I asked Professor Ben Naanen and MOSOP Leader Fegalo Nsuke if they could expand on the incident. According to Professor Naanen: 

So when four leading Ogoni chiefs, including former leaders of MOSOP that had resigned because of the crisis, connected to June 12, were having a meeting in Gokana, in Giokoo, there was a mob action that resulted in the murder of the chiefs. But even that mob action is complicated.

Mr Nsuke also mentioned that:

It appears there was some confusion, and it was a mob action. So nobody could really understand who was involved and who was not involved. My investigation does not tell me who was involved and who was not involved. Frankly speaking, I’ve even heard stories like, the four were not killed in Giokoo. I’ve heard those kinds of stories…like two were killed outside of that place on their way running somewhere. Who killed them? We don’t know.

Apparently, the annulled June 12 election of 1993, played a role in the murder of the four Ogoni elders. In previous episodes, I discussed how the Ogonis boycotted the election and how the boycott caused a rift within MOSOP. I also mentioned how while Saro-Wiwa was away in Europe raising awareness about the boycott some MOSOP leaders tried to convince the Ogoni masses to abandon the boycott. These leaders, which included the President and Vice-President of MOSOP, Dr. Garrick Leton and Edward Kobani, also tried to convince the Ogoni masses to allow Shell to resume their oil drilling activities in Ogoni. The people refused. One reason was traditional:  it is Ogoni tradition that where blood has been spilled, the soil where the violence occurred must not be touched for a period of time during which special ceremonies are required to cleanse the earth and appease the spirits. Secondly, the Ogonis were suspicious of MOSOP’s sudden pivot and not even the promise of money from Shell could change their minds.

By June 2nd, ten days before the elections, Saro-Wiwa had returned to Ogoni from Europe. When Saro-Wiwa returned to Ogoni, MOSOP elders convened a meeting.

According to Saro-Wiwa’s brother, Dr Owens Wiwa, in the book, The Politics of Bones, Edward Kobani, one of the murdered chiefs, confronted Saro-Wiwa over the decision to boycott the elections. Saro-Wiwa admitted that he acted wrongly in announcing the boycott on CNN without the decision being formally approved at MOSOP. To make the decision formal, Saro-Wiwa placed a motion before the MOSOP leadership to boycott the June 12 elections. The motion was put to a vote, and the MOSOP leadership voted to boycott the elections by a count of eleven to six. Disagreeing with this outcome, Dr. Garrick Leton, and Edward Kobani resigned as President and Vice-President of MOSOP. 

Around this same time, a group of Ogoni chiefs, including Chief Samuel Orage, one of the four murdered MOSOP elders, met the Federal administrator of Rivers State and presented a document disclaiming Saro-Wiwa as the spokesperson of the Ogoni people. The document also pledged support to any decision the Federal Government took to protect government property and prevent a breakdown of law and order in Ogoni. This document was broadcast widely on the radio across Rivers State to the dismay of many Ogonis who began to refer to the chiefs as vultures. 

The people were seething with anger. And so there was a fall through, more about people collecting money from Shell. They called some people vultures and all that. And so when they heard that some of these leaders were addressing a meeting, they descended on them, resulting in the murder of those four chiefs, which, to all intents and purposes, we cannot say they were involved in anything. I think they were innocent. But you see one thing that happened, rumors and so on, and as people say later, the security forces. I mean, there’s some subterranean things to stoke all these things. Some of us are convinced that the agent provocateur was involved, some of these things. So the murder became what we call in Latin ‘Casus Belli’ to declare war on Ogoni. That was the decisive moment to strike. They could have instigated that to provide that opportunity to strike. So that is how you saw the repression in Ogoni, the massive destruction, arresting of people. So it is in that connection that we see the arrest of Saro-Wiwa and 20 more others. 

On the morning of 4 May 1994, Saro-Wiwa was prevented by military personnel from entering Ogoniland. Later that day, the tragic murders of the four Ogoni Chiefs occurred. Shortly after, Lieutenant Komo announced that MOSOP, led by Saro-Wiwa, had orchestrated the killings. 

The military accused Saro-Wiwa of inciting the attack, even though security agents had prevented him from entering Ogoniland earlier that day. On the following morning, Lieutenant Colonel Komo held a press conference. 

And in the bag there, for you to inspect later, are remnants and pieces of bones from various parts of the body that they have been able to recover from the scene where the burning took place. 

This is the jaw, look at the teeth, can you see? This is one, two, three. So a portion of the mouth here has been torn off and then burnt just as you can see, but then, this particular appearance of teeth will actually convince you that this is part of a human being. 

Ogoni is bleeding, and not by federal troops, genocidal federal troops, as some of the papers carried days back, but by irresponsible and reckless thuggery of the MOSOP elements which, as I said, must stop immediately. And I therefore call on you to report accurately on this event, and to stop being used as propaganda tools conveniently for some dictator like Ken Saro-Wiwa. 

Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders like Ledum Mitee, were immediately arrested and detained but not charged with any crime. The military then took the next step in their vendetta against the Ogoni people.

I have directed all the villagers that took part must be rounded up. MOSOP leadership that was part of this thing must be arrested, and the security forces are out doing just that. 

The response from the security forces was pretty much a declaration of war against the Ogoni people, and no one was spared. Across all the Ogoni villages, men, women, children, the elderly, and Ogoni livestock were put under strict surveillance with the security forces violently attacking anyone and anything in their path. Those who resisted arrest were killed, their livestock were massacred, farms destroyed, and their homes burnt to the ground. Dr Domale Keys, who we met in the last episode, and Professor Naanen told me about their personal experiences of these raids.  

So my family fled Ogoni, like I said, we were in Bori. My family was in Bori, and Bori was heavily hit when it came to retaliation. I remember many nights for months, even my mother and I would be in the small apartment, and we’d have to shut the doors and put those, I’ve forgotten what they call them. But there are these iron bars that close the doors. And you’d have to stay within those because you didn’t want anybody to know that you were home. So we would stay in there. And at night, you could go and figure out how to get food, and then you come back. And then there were some nights when there were guns just blazing all over the place. And so there was, there were many nights when we had to rush to the forest areas, right? And it would just be so many, just hordes of people, running, rushing into the forest, and you’d have to sleep there for a day, two days.

Nobody was checking the Internal Security Task Force that was deployed to the area. So Paul Okuntimo was like the military strongman in Ogoni. He wasn’t accountable to anybody as the commander of the Internal Security Task Force. So anybody that they laid hands on they could pick. In fact, somebody, Kpuinen, one of them, I could remember, was even in Lagos. He was arrested in Lagos, not even in Ogoni, where he had gone to seek refuge. They didn’t have any direct anything against him, but he just lumped him into jail and then, were being tried collectively. That is the nature of things. There was no due diligence in terms of investigation. But they wanted to settle scores in Ogoni. That was primary to the military. They wanted to settle scores in Ogoni, and so many of them were, the military tribunal said, okay, we will find them guilty, Saro-Wiwa and others. Saro-Wiwa was actually campaigning for the constitutional conference when he was arrested. He wasn’t even in the scene. The military were all over the place, and killing four prominent people was not an act that could be accomplished in 30 minutes. Alright? so there is every evidence that the military knew what was happening. They failed to intervene, which made some people accuse them of complicity, of acting as Agent Provocateur in that whole situation, just to settle Ogoni scores and destroy MOSOP.

According to Amnesty International, for months after, many young women, pregnant women, and elderly women, were raped and beaten by bloodthirsty soldiers under Okuntimo’s command. Okuntimo later told reporters that he was acting because of Shell, but he was also unhappy because he had asked Shell to pay his men their work allowances but Shell had refused. With their houses destroyed and looted, the surviving Ogoni people fled into the bushes, across the state, and many found their way across the border to Cameroon and Benin Republic as refugees. Ogoniland was sealed off from the rest of Rivers State, as well as Nigeria. 

So we left early 1996 out of Ogoni, and traveled by night, of course. We went to Lagos, and then we went to Cotonou, and then they resettled us to just, I think, the outskirts of Benin.

There is no possibility whatsoever that I or MOSOP, could ever have planned any such action. And I will forever vow it, no matter what any forum decides upon. I appeal to you, My Lord, for only one thing. The Ogoni people have suffered tremendously in this country. They have made tremendous contributions to this country. The Niger Delta itself is in serious trouble. We need every assistance that we can get.

Despite not being in Ogoni on the day of the murders, Saro-Wiwa was arrested, with 13 other members of MOSOP. 

Very seriously, nothing could have saved me. The point is, I had just stepped out of the country when the arrests were made. Three squads were dispatched, from what I gathered. One was for Saro-Wiwa, one for Ledun Mitee, the deputy president, and one was me. Because somehow it was erroneously felt that having a PhD, bright young person, that I was the intellectual adviser to Ken Saro-Wiwa but Saro-Wiwa was an intellectual on his own. I didn’t have to prompt him, alright, but I was high on the government agenda. No doubt about it.

Eight months passed in detention in Port-Harcourt Prison, before Saro-Wiwa and the other 13 arrested MOSOP members were charged with the murders of the four Ogoni elders, and arraigned before a military tribunal in January 1995. 

The very next month, the two main prosecution witnesses, Charles Danwi and Nayone Akpa, signed affidavits alleging that Shell had paid them to testify against Saro-Wiwa offering thirty thousand naira, a house, and a contract with the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC). 

Without the key witnesses of the prosecution, the Military Tribunal still went ahead with trial in February 1995. It was only at this late stage that Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues were allowed to choose their lawyers. 

Judge: Mister Saro-Wiwa, we want you to answer ‘yes or no’

Saro-Wiwa: yes or no. 

Judge: Yes. 

Saro-Wiwa: yes or no. 

laughter in the court 

Judge: We are not joking here. Can you get up? Stand up. The question we are asking you is that, we are giving you what time you need to get a counsel of your own choice. 

As far as Saro-Wiwa was concerned, this was a show trial, what Nigerians refer to as a kangaroo court. For one, he and the other prosecuted MOSOP members were civilians. And according to the Nigerian Constitution, they were to be tried before a civilian court, and not before a military tribunal. Secondly, the Abacha government had given them no time to get legal counsel. Still, notable Human Rights activists and lawyers like Gani Fawehinmi and Femi Falana volunteered to represent Saro-Wiwa and his MOSOP colleagues. 

The next step the Abacha regime took was to frustrate the trial process. One tactic they employed was to set a date for trial, then after the defendants and their lawyers showed up before the tribunal, the Judge would adjourn to a new date. These postponements wasted the resources of the defendants and their lawyers. In frustration, Fawehinmi and Falana resigned and the defendants were left without legal representation. 

While in prison with the other MOSOP members, Saro-Wiwa was routinely tortured and denied access to his family and friends. I asked Saro-Wiwa’s daughter, Noo, what she made of the arrest. 

You know, Wole Soyinka had been incarcerated, and that was the way it was in Nigeria. That’s what it felt like. But yeah, I naively believed that this was more saber-rattling from the government and that he would come out eventually. 

Abacha had no intention of letting Saro-Wiwa off the hook. In fact, on July 31, 1995, three months before the verdict was passed on 31 October, Abacha’s legal affairs adviser, Professor Auwal Yadudu declared that Saro-Wiwa was guilty before the UN Committee for the Eradication of Racism and Discrimination. Saro-Wiwa on his part realized that Abacha had a vendetta against him. And to show that he knew Abacha’s military tribunal was a sham, Saro-Wiwa refused to testify in his defense. 

This turned out to be the final nail in Saro-Wiwa’s coffin. In its verdict, the Military Tribunal declared that Saro-Wiwa had made no statement in his defense and as such his silence was deemed an admission of the charge of murder. According to Michael Birnbaum, a UK based Human Rights Lawyer, and an international observer of Abacha’s tribunal: 

When they came to give their judgment, they pretended, and there’s no other word for it, that Ken Saro-Wiwa hadn’t challenged any of the prosecution evidence so they could take it all as being true without even having to think about whether it was or not. And that just seemed to me to be totally dishonest and to show their bias against him. 

Between October 30 and 31 1995, the military tribunal freed six of the initial fifteen men arrested, including Ledum Mitee, the new MOSOP vice president at the time. But the tribunal found Saro-Wiwa and the remaining eight Ogoni defendants guilty of murder and sentenced them to death. 

These men became known  as ‘The Ogoni 9’. 

In all of this, an important question hangs in the air: what was Abacha’s vendetta against the Ogoni 9? Why was he so determined to make sure that Saro-Wiwa and the eight other MOSOP members were found guilty despite no concrete evidence that they were responsible for the murder of the four Ogoni chiefs? Why did Abacha want Saro-Wiwa dead? Despite all the questions raised about the fairness and legality of the arrests and trial, why did Abacha’s military tribunal go ahead to sentence the Ogoni 9 to death? Professor Naanen and Noo captured the uncertainty people held around Abacha’s decision. 

You know, the Abacha regime wanted to destroy MOSOP, and maybe if you were in the position, I don’t know whether you would have done otherwise. 

Okay, so I was, I was getting a little bit nervous, but this is 1995 and the Commonwealth summit was about to take place. And you had people like Nelson Mandela, who himself had spent, you know, 30 years in prison. And I think the 90s, looking back, was a real decade of optimism. You always felt that things would be okay, and that you had this international community; whether it’s the UN or the African Union and all these human rights groups like Amnesty International. And then we had British entrepreneurs like Anita Roddick of the Body Shop, who was a very big supporter of my father. And so you felt that, with the goodwill of all of these people and all the human rights laws, international human rights laws, in place, I really felt it would be okay.

What seems clear is that from the outset, the Abacha regime faced questions of political credibility and acceptance not just from Nigerians, but also on the international political scene. Because of this, Abacha was keen to impose the authority of his administration in the eyes of his critics. Professor Toyin Falola agreed with this viewpoint. 

Abacha could not even travel out of Nigeria. Nobody wanted him. Nobody wanted to associate with them. So he thought, with respect to the Ogoni community, he could kill the nine and maybe there’ll be peace. And if you accumulate this event with other things, Abacha was signaling to the international community that he was going to be opposed to external resistance. 

Coincidentally, shortly before the Ogoni 9 were tried and sentenced to death, Abacha had also imprisoned Nigerian statesmen such as General Olusegun Obasanjo and General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua on charges of treason, along with 40 other alleged coup plotters. Abacha’s regime had sentenced them all to death. Following international intervention from figures like US president Bill Clinton, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and South Africa’s Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, Abacha had revised the death sentences to life imprisonment. 

But when it came to the Ogoni 9, Abacha instructed the Provisional Ruling Council, his regime’s highest decision making body, to show no mercy. After changing the death sentences of Obasanjo and the alleged coup plotters, Abacha seemingly found scapegoats in the Ogoni 9. 

On the economic side of things, Abacha also wanted to send a signal to investors that he was a man they could do business with, and one who would protect their investments. The fact that Saro-Wiwa had made enemies within MOSOP who were willing to testify against him, such as Dr. Garrick Leton and Senator Bennett Birabi, cemented Abacha’s resolve to pass the death verdict on the Ogoni 9. MOSOP leader Ledum Mitee, who had just been acquitted by the tribunal recalled: 

After the judgment was read, when they pronounced, they said I was discharged, at first I had, ‘oh God, thank God’ but next when I heard what they were saying, they condemned..  I broke down and cried. He was the person holding me in that court.  

With the announcement of the military tribunal’s verdict, the story and fate of the Ogoni 9 became truly international. 

It’s the only hope that my father has now. If the Commonwealth doesn’t say anything he will be executed.

That was Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Junior. Racing against time, Saro-Wiwa’s family members, friends, and human rights activists, reached out to prominent figures in the international community to prevent the worst from happening. For example, Saro-Wiwa’s brother, Owens Wiwa, met one-on-one with the Managing Director of Shell Nigeria, Brian Anderson, to leverage the status of the giant oil corporation in getting Abacha to pardon the Ogoni 9. 

Human rights organizations such as the Constitutional Rights Project raised awareness about the plight of the Ogoni 9 by submitting communications to the African Commission of Human Rights and to the United Nations, first in September 1994 before trial began, and again in June 1995. PEN International, the international association of writers based in London, also sent a letter to Abacha, protesting the unfair conduct of the trial, and calling for the release of the Ogoni 9. In October 1995, PEN International sent a copy of the letter to the United Nations and the African Commission of Human Rights. 

Previously, in 1994, Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP had been awarded the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. Now, after the verdict, Saro-Wiwa himself was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Amnesty International was also actively involved in creating awareness about the trial and verdict. Even within Nigeria, there was virtually no public support for the verdict of the military tribunal except from within Abacha’s administration. Noo and Professor Naanen told me a bit more about this period.

You always felt that things would be okay, and that you had this international community; whether it’s the UN or the African Union and all these human rights groups like Amnesty International. And then we had British entrepreneurs like Anita Roddick of the Body Shop, who was a very big supporter of my father. And so you felt that, with the goodwill of all of these people and all the human rights laws, international human rights laws, in place, I really felt it would be okay. My brother Ken, Jr, he went to New Zealand, where the Commonwealth summit was being held, and he was talking to…he was meeting with all sorts of people. He met with Nelson Mandela. He met with different Nigerian government ministers. And you just think, well, surely things are going to be okay. You can’t imagine that… I just felt that ultimately, the Nigerian government would, you know, defer to that sort of global authority. Especially when you had people like Nelson Mandela, even though he wasn’t as vocal as I wanted him to be. And I’ve since found out that there were reasons for that. He’d been discouraged, apparently, by Thabo Mbeki, you know, not to criticize the Nigerian government too much. But still, he was there at the summit. And I felt, no, it’s going to be okay. 

Mandela, obviously one of the most respected statesmen in the world at the time, from what we gathered, and what is even here on record with me, had secured a promise from Abacha that even if the tribunal found Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues guilty, that they would not be executed. So it was an agreement between Abacha and Mandela. I think Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded, made that known. 

Mandela had met Abacha personally and pleaded for the release of the Ogoni 9. On 10 October 1995, after Saro-Wiwa received an official nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, it was hoped that this latest international recognition would put pressure on the Abacha regime to pardon Saro-Wiwa and his comrades. But there was little time to savour this honour, nor did it seem to have any effect on the resolve of Abacha’s regime. According to Ken Junior:

We did try to meet with Mandela because we felt he was the one politician with the authority and the standing to say something, to intervene on my father’s behalf and on behalf of the other Ogonis. We tried to meet him, and we didn’t. 

The fate of the Ogoni 9 now hung in the balance. Everyone involved in advocating for the release of the Ogoni 9 felt that sooner or later, Abacha would bow to pressure from the international community. But no one knew exactly just how little time the Ogoni 9 had left. MOSOP leader Nsuke recalled that:

There was a lot of lobbying internationally, and with the pressure going on, nobody really expected that General Abacha would kill Ken Saro-Wiwa. 

When Abacha seized power in 1993, not many could have predicted the turn of events that would lead up to the arrest and trial of Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni comrades. The murders of the four Ogoni chiefs on 21 May1 1994 had rocked the Ogoni community, and deepened the rivalries within MOSOP. But it also empowered Abacha’s regime to charge Saro-Wiwa and other MOSOP leaders with the crime, and then carry out a brutal repressive campaign against the Ogoni populace. 

Abacha’s vendetta against the Ogoni 9 was fueled by political and economic factors. He would show the international community that he was his own man, who could resist foreign interference. He would also signal to key stakeholders interested in Nigeria’s oil wealth that he was a man they could do business with. Considering all of these, and in the wake of the pressure from the international community, did the Ogoni 9 stand any chance of getting their verdict overturned by Abacha?

Before we answer this, it’s worth thinking beyond Saro-Wiwa for a moment and about who the other eight  members of the Ogoni 9 were. What further depth and range could their stories add to the overarching narrative we’ve been developing so far? For one, most of them were not members of the elite and several of them were not even MOSOP leaders. Could the backgrounds of these men reveal something about the mechanics and real motivations behind how they were arrested? Could the impact of these arrests on their families help us better understand the scale of the Abacha regime’s Ogoni repression? Next week on The Republic, we’ll tackle these and many other questions.  

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⎈