By Tochukwu Ezukanma | Lagos, Nigeria | March 22, 2014 – There are some Nigerians, a select few, of both living and dead that exceptionally distinguished themselves in politics, business and the professions and in acts of courage, sacrifice for the public good, selfless services to humanity, etc; and thus, deserved to be honored. The honoring of some of such individuals with the recent Nigeria centenary awards was splendid.  However, I was struck by the absence of Saro Wiwo from the list of the award recipients. He should have been on the list. He was a martyr; courageously and selflessly, he fought and died for a just cause.

He once told a prominent Nigerian book publisher that he knew that, sooner or later, he will be killed by the Nigerian authorities for standing up for environment and social justice for his people, the Ogoni, and other minorities in the oil producing areas of the South-South. But, before his death, he wanted the world to hear him. It was a poignant statement that was reminiscent of the declarations of Black American civil right leaders of the 1960s, who were ready to labor, sacrifice and possibly die for the racial emancipation of their people.

Before his death, he lucidly told his story to the world. The world heard him and accepted his story with its benign and innocuous ring. His story did not distort the facts, it exquisitely embellished them. It did not actually lie, but it, deliberately, refrained from telling the whole truth. And as such, despite the intolerance and occasional violence of Ken Saro Wiwo and his organization, Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), he successfully cast himself to the international community as an environment activist whose only grouse with the Sani Abacha government and its oil multinational corporate allies was with the environment. He was only demanding that they respect the environment in their exploitation of oil: stop polluting the environment (with all its attendant health hazards) and making it impossible for his people, the Ogoni, who are farmers and fishermen to farm and fish.

So, when Sani Abacha hung this world acclaimed environmental activist, it generated a groundswell of anti Abachaism in the international community. The death of Saro Wiwo did more harm to the Abacha government than the years of Nigerian Democratic Coalition (NADECO) opposition to it. The governments of the United States of America and other Western powers could not resolutely support of the then Nigerian president-elect, Moshood Abiola, because, although he was democratically elected, they were weary of what one American writer called his “checkered business history”. He was notoriously corruption and his business interests scraped to, and sometimes, strayed perceptibly into the spheres of illegality. The Western powers were also not impressed by NADECO’s pious posturing and moralizing homilies on democracy and good governance because NADECO was dominated by former members of the Nigerian power elite, most of who abused their offices and corruptly enriched themselves.

More than any other factor, it was the death of Saro Wiwo that turned the international public opinion against Sani Abacha and quickened the demise of his government. Prior to his death, the anti-Abacha protests in Washington, DC, under the auspices of NADECO and a variety of its other Nigerian pro-democracy affiliates attracted few Nigerians and rarely any American, but after his death, a significant number of Americans joined in these demonstrations.

Many Europeans and Americans know that beyond their shores, Western multinational corporations jettison Western labor and environment standards and collude with Third World dictators to exploit the indigenous people. They tolerate and sometimes, encourage the harassment and murder of activists (by Third World governments) for daring to speak out against the exploitation of the people and disregard for safety and environment laws by the multinationals. Therefore, to them, Saro Wiwo was a martyr; a victim of this pattern of collusion between dictators and multinationals to exploit, oppress and murder.

The legacies of Ken Saro Wiwo’s crusade against environmental degradation by the oil companies and the insensitivity of the Nigerian government to the poverty and deprivation of the indigenous people whose land yield the black gold that fuels the Nigerian economy are incontrovertibly evident. It awakened aspirations of the Ogoni people and the entire peoples of the South-South; got the oil companies committed (at least in principles) to respect the environment in their oil exploitation and to ameliorate earlier environmental devastations; nudged the Nigerian government into plowing back more money from the oil wealth into the oil producing areas for education, jobs, health services and social amenities; etc. .

Above all, it changed the power dynamics in Nigeria politics; with the most magnificent outcome of this restructured balance of power being the presidency of an ethnic minority from the South-South geopolitical zone, Goodluck Jonathan. In the 2^nd Republic, Mama Agbagha rightly wrote that “Nigeria is a political tripod”. The three legs of this metaphorical three-legged frame were, of course, the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa. Then, it was axiomatic that the three major ethnic groups of Nigeria dominated Nigerian politics and dictated its tenor. But that has changed; the minorities of the South-South became significant and decisive players in Nigerian politics. Today, an imaginative writer’s characterization of Nigerian politics will not be that of a political tripod but a political quadruped. The four feet of this figurative four-footed organism are the Igbo, Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba and the Southern minorities.

Saro Wiwo should have been honored post-humously for his extraordinary courage and willingness to lay down his life for the betterment of the Ogoni people and other peoples of the South-South, and by extension, all Nigerians.

Tochukwu Ezukanma writes from Lagos, Nigeria.

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