By Olukorede Yishau
If he was not executed alongside 8 of his Ogoni kinsmen by the regime of the late Gen. Sani Abacha in 1995, writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa would have turned 80 last Sunday. He had planned to read a speech the day he was executed but he was not allowed to read it.
He had planned to say: “My Lord, we all stand before history. I am a man of peace, of ideas, appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by the political marginalisation and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country, as a whole, a fair and just democratic system. I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated.”
November 10 will make it 26 years that the military junta chose to go for the messenger rather than the message. A lot of water has gone under the proverbial bridge since then. Ogoni, the significant part of Rivers which Saro-Wiwa fought and died for, is still on its throes. Oil giants’ evil deeds on its land are still telling on the health and wealth of the people. Many other oil-bearing communities in Rivers are also down on their knees. No thanks to Shylocks masquerading as oil giants.
The Niger Delta still grapples with a lot of issues. Close to the year of the birth of the Amnesty Programme, the agitation in the region took a new twist. Before the deadly twist, Saro-Wiwa had been judicially murdered. Several other people had been killed by security operatives under one guise or the other. With intellectual activists like Saro-Wiwa out of the way, another generation of activists took over. This set believes if you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent change inevitable. They also believe it is illegal to be lawful in a lawless environment. So they took to arms in their quest to prove a point.
They damaged oil pipelines at a devastating speed. They bombed military boat houses. They siphoned barrels of oil. No thanks to these dare-devils, oil installations were blown up and oil workers feared to go to the rigs and others. The economy bled. The country was losing billions daily.
All the violence and blood-letting were because of oil, a commodity that is non-renewable and will fizzle out with time. And, after oil, we will remember Oloibiri and how oil has left it impotent. We will remember Ogoni land and how oil killed its leading lights, such as the great Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa. We will remember oil and remember with dismay that Ogoni people had no choice but to drink benzene-contaminated water. We will remember oil and remember poverty, degradation, rejection and desperation. We will remember oil and remember imageries of luxury here and there, but in short supply.
Long after oil has stopped being our main source of revenue, we will remember wealth was something many heard about and saw when the rich chose to throw their weight about. We will certainly remember that despite all the wealth around the region, many students and pupils stayed at home because school fees were gold and diamond their parents could not afford.
How can we ever forget that while oil reigned in some parts of the Niger Delta, they never saw night. Reason: the multinational firms in these areas have their flow stations so close to homes and send out gas flares throughout the day. So, the only way to differentiate between night and day is to check their wrist watches.
We will always remember that while oil was the lord, oil pipelines in many towns were not underground and often burst, damaging soils and existence. Will it be possible to forget that the people shouted, protested and threatened violence over their fate, yet change refused to come?
The oil giants seem to have another licence: to send their hosts to early graves so that their leaders can have all the wealth for themselves, including the little they manage to spend on basic amenities. This environmental genocide is having serious effects on the people. And we will never forget.
Long after oil, we will not forget that strange diseases killed the people, pregnant women developed strange allergies while health centres were ill-equipped to take care of their health needs. We will never forget that several people developed aggravated asthma and respiratory symptoms, such as coughing and difficult or painful breathing, chronic bronchitis, increased and premature deaths were not uncommon.
We will always remember that while oil was the lord, oil majors were more interested in the oil than in the people. They can die for all they care. We will remember their mantra: Oil is more important than man. How can we ever forget that while oil reigned we all forgot agriculture which, before independence from the colonial masters, paid our bills. Long after oil, we will remember the interventionist agencies set up to improve the lot of the Niger Delta people. We will remember how, at a point, the oil cash meant for the betterment of the people were given to an herbalist by the head of the board of an interventionist agency. We will remember that one of these agencies became a cesspool for corruption where contracts were hawked like bean cakes, where insiders encouraged outsiders to sue the agency so that judgment debts could be shared. We will not forget that while oil reigned, greedy men stuffed dollars — millions of it— in safes tucked away in poverty-stricken communities. We will remember the yachts, the private jets, the mansions, the diamond wristwatches and the world they bought with stolen oil cash.
We will remember that men and women thrust into positions of influence used them to acquire affluence. We will apparently not forget that in the oil era men lost their conscience and humanity to the extent they bought guns for the youths to take out political adversaries.
When we remember oil, we will have at the back of our minds the 12-Day Revolution in the Creeks in 1967, which was championed by the trio of Isaac Adaka Boro, Samuel Owonaru and Nothingham Dick in a failed bid to secede from Nigeria.
We will also remember protests and agitation by groups, such as the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), led by the late Saro-Wiwa.
My final take: When we remember these facts, we will remember the pains, tears, sorrow and blood that followed. We will also not forget the good things that oil brought, but we will continue to debate whether or not we would have been greater if agriculture had not been abandoned because of black gold.
Rest well, dear Saro-Wiwa and fellow Ogoni travellers.
Quote
I am a man of peace, of ideas, appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by the political marginalisation and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system.
• Yishau is a newspaper columnist and author of’In The Name of Our Father’and’Vaults of Secrets’.