Why a Pardon Is Not Justice for Ken Saro-Wiwa

This interview appears in our print issue, ‘100 Years of Ladi Kwali: Stories from Another Nigeria’. Buy here.

Thirty years later, the politics of oil may have evolved, but complications linger: in 2025, Nigeria’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, granted a posthumous pardon to 13 Ogonis, including the Ogoni Nine (Saro-Wiwa, Barinem Kiobel, John Kpuinen, Baribor Bera, Felix Nuate, Paul Levula, Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo and Daniel Gbokoo), who Ogonis still insist were wrongfully executed for murder. ‘A pardon means that you have committed a crime and you are being forgiven for it,’ Noo said. ‘Exoneration means you never committed a crime in the first place. There is a very clear and obvious difference there. Perhaps, President Tinubu, being a politician has to compromise because there are people with a vested interest in denigrating my father’s memory. It is a welcome step in the right direction but there is a long way to go.’

Moreover, oil giant Shell has since divested from its onshore assets, even as the Niger Delta continues to bear the scars of decades of pollution. ‘It is almost like, by selling these oil fields to different companies, they can potentially absolve themselves of any legal responsibility for environmental damage,’ Noo told me.

In this wide-ranging conversation, conducted across Lagos and London, Saro-Wiwa reflects on her father’s moral clarity, the afterlives of state violence, what it means to memorialize a struggle that is still ongoing and what lies ahead for the Ogonis. ‘The thing with environmental degradation is that every generation that is born into it knows nothing else,’ she explained. ‘They have no clean, beautiful past to compare it to. I have seen it with my own eyes, young boys playing around in abandoned villages. Villages abandoned by oil spills. You see young boys jumping into the river or the lakes that are highly carcinogenic, because that is all they know. They don’t recognize the devastation around them as being a degradation of what went on before for them, that is just normal. That is their baseline normality. Without my father, it would have been worse.’

Our full conversation continues below, edited for brevity and clarity.