Nigeria must own up to the blood shed for oil

 The Nigerian government is struggling to confront its past abuses, and nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the Ogoni nine, the environmental activists from the Niger Delta hanged in 1995 by the Sani Abacha regime on trumped-up charges.

I was five years old when playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, a leading figure in the Ogoni people’s movement, was executed alongside eight others, and I lived through the legacy of his fight to protect the oil-rich land by Shell and other corporations.
As a young boy growing up in the Niger Delta, there was no escape from oil. Spillages, the vandalisation of oil pipes, the deaths from polluted water – headlines reported these horrors weekly. We were always aware of the price indigenous communities were being forced to pay, losing their land and all beneath it to the state and its foreign partners. Saro-Wiwa died fighting to change that.
Today is the 20th anniversary of their “judicial killing”, but attempts to draw attention to the cause they fought for has been shut down by state authorities – not for the first time.
A memorial in the form of a large steel bus was impounded by customs in Lagos for six weeks because it is considered “politically inflammatory”. A quote from Saro-Wiwa written on the side of the sculpture accuses the oil companies of “practising genocide against the Ogoni”.
Hameed Ali, current controller-general of the Nigeria’s customs authority – responsible for detaining the sculpture – was a member of the tribunal that ordered the execution in 1995, a fact seized upon by commentators who suggest that the culture of silence and denial around the deaths remains strong today.
There has been no official government apology to the families of the Ogoni nine. “They’re passing a message that they do not regret their actions,” says Saatah Nubari, a Port Harcourt-based activist.