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KEN SARO-WIWA PARDONED POSTHUMOUSLY BUT OIL STILL SCARS NIGERIA’S
LANDS AND COMMUNITIES  
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Andrea Spinelli Barrile
July 17, 2025
Il Manifesto Global
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_ In the mid-1990s Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP denounced the military junta
for failing to enforce regulations on oil companies. They were given a
summary trial, then rushed to the gallows. _

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“This is it – they are going to arrest us all and execute us. All
for Shell.” 

With those words, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer, environmental
activist, and advocate for the rights of the Ogoni people, foretold
his fate. Now, 30 years after he and eight comrades from the Movement
for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) were hanged on November
10, 1995, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has announced a posthumous
pardon.

Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa, known as Ken, was the foremost voice of Ogoni
culture and among the most influential intellectuals of post-colonial
Africa. Born in Dahomey, in French colonial Africa, now the Republic
of Benin, he was a writer and playwright, poet and activist, civil
servant and publisher. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became a nonviolent
champion of the Ogoni people's struggle for self-determination, with a
particular focus on stopping the destruction of the ecosystem in the
vast Niger Delta, a 70,000-square-kilometer region of Nigeria also
known as Oil Rivers because, before the arrival of multinational oil
companies, palm oil was produced there.

That battle has so far proved futile: the delta now pumps more than
two million barrels of crude each day. All the world’s largest oil
companies have profited, and are now selling their onshore assets to
focus on offshore gas after decades of poisoning the land and water
and uprooting whole communities.

President Tinubu, speaking to the National Assembly on Thursday, June
12, not only announced the pardon but also bestowed on Saro-Wiwa and
the eight others the rank of Commander of the Order of Niger, one of
the country’s highest honors.

In the mid-1990s Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP openly and publicly denounced the
military junta of General Sani Abacha for failing to enforce
regulations on oil companies and ignoring environmental law. They were
given a summary trial in a military court, then rushed to the gallows
in a Port Harcourt barracks.

Ken Saro Wiwa's family said they were pleased with the presidential
decision, according to a statement signed by his daughter Noo
Saro-Wiwa, a British-Nigerian writer: “We want to believe that the
conferment of these national honors symbolizes the innocence of these
heroes and further reinforces the global view that the sentence handed
down almost 30 years ago was wrong and their execution is considered
to be judicial murder.” 

Noo Saro-Wiwa then reiterated the accusations against Shell for the
“environmental devastation” wrought in the Niger Delta, noting
that the Danish company only began divesting its on-shore assets there
in 2024 – 263 oil wells, 56 gas wells and 3,173 kilometers of
pipelines, valued at roughly $2.4 billion.

In March 2022, a Dutch court dismissed a lawsuit that four widows of
the 1995 activists – Saro-Wiwa’s widow among them – had brought
against Shell: the Danish company was accused of forging documents and
bribing witnesses to escape liability for pollution and corruption.
The company had already paid $15.5 million to a group of activist
families, including Saro Wiwa’s family, in a 2009 settlement, while
continuing to deny all responsibility.

Calling for “a review of the judicial process that led to this
flawed verdict, which caused such a colossal loss to our family, to
the Ogoni people and to Nigerians,” Noo Saro-Wiwa said the
presidential pardon was “the right thing to do.”

But not everyone applauded President Tinubu’s move. “You cannot
pardon someone who has not committed any crime: we demand full
acquittal,” insisted Celestine Akpobari, coordinator of the Ogoni
Solidarity Forum, while veteran environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, head
of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, warned: “Ken Saro-Wiwa and
the others deserve to be honored, but at a time when the government is
desperate and wants to boost oil output, while pollution goes on
unabated, this decision is out of place.”

Bassey fears that the ongoing reassignment of oil licenses could
reopen wells in Ogoniland, “a move that would mean dancing on the
graves” of activists like Saro-Wiwa: “Exoneration is the political
action we are demanding from the government, to end the environmental
genocide and other crimes committed against the Ogoni people.”

These are concrete fears: Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation,
still earns more than 90 percent of its export revenue and about
two-thirds of state income from oil. The economy remains dangerously
dependent on hydrocarbons, which, while they have the advantage of
bringing in foreign currency, have the disadvantage of tying up that
foreign currency in the budget to clean up a vast poisoned territory.

The devastation of the Niger Delta, caused by oil and related
activities, including oil theft from pipelines which causes continuous
spills, has been linked to oil companies by studies conducted by the
United Nations, non-governmental organizations and numerous
journalistic investigations – as has the unequal distribution of oil
revenues, which has caused, and continues to cause, clashes between
local populations and political wars.

The Ogoni are not alone in claiming their rights: the Ogale and the
Bille peoples managed to bring a case against Shell last year in
London’s High Court, and, more broadly, the Niger Delta hosts one
quarter of Nigeria’s population: some 56 million people living in a
scarred, dangerous territory that has never been reclaimed. A
territory that, like the memory of Ken Saro-Wiwa, ought to stand as a
warning to humanity.

_Il manifesto was founded in 1969 on the idea that truth and
freethinking are more important than everything else, including
profit. The paper pays for its editorial idealism in the form of lost
advertising. But we more than make up for this in the support of tens
of thousands of subscribers who believe a better world is possible.
There are no owners (il manifesto is a cooperative), and the editor
and managers are elected every four years by the employees. We
maintain a newsroom in Rome and correspondents around the world,
filing dispatches from Paris, London, Berlin, Jerusalem, Havana, New
York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. _

Originally published at
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* Ken Saro-Wiwa
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* Nigeria
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* oil companies
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* Shell Oil
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