Politics of Bones Dr. Owens Wiwa And the Struggle for Nigeria's Oil

PROLOGUE Dr. Owens Wiwa walked behind his brother's coffin worrying like an old woman. On this sweltering Monday morning in April 2000, it seemed as if all of Ogoniland had come to witness the funeral of Ken Saro-Wiwa tens of thousands of people, an excitable, militant throng, jockeying for a glimpse of the casket. Ken had wanted a small, private funeral; this was definitely not what he'd had in mind. The procession slowly parted the crowds in Bane as Ken's daughter Zina, holding a large crucifix of hibiscus flowers, led the cortege. Behind the pallbearers, her twin sister, Noo, held aloft a large colour photograph of their father in a golden frame. Ken Junior followed, in his role of chief mourner, leading his uncle Owens and the rest of the immediate family toward the church. The little cinder-block chapel in Bane had been packed for more than an hour with members of the media and groggy villagers who had stayed up all night dancing, singing, and drumming. Tribesmen crowded around the open windows and doors and spilled into the adjacent fields, fanning themselves with copies of the hastily printed church bulletin that stated the ceremony would commence with the "Reception of the Corpse at the entrance of the West Door." But everyone knew there was no corpse. The coffin that was carried through the village and into the chapel was empty except for two books (On a Darkling PlainandPita Dumbrok's Prison) and the curved-stem pipe Ken smoked before his hanging. Since November 10, 1995, the bones of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the celebrated author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, had lain in a secret, unmarked grave, reportedly mingled with the remains of the eight other men who were hanged with him. Before being charged with murder, Ken had spent seventeen years leading non-violent protests against the destructive exploitation of Ogoniland by multinational oil companies like Royal Dutch/Shell. The paradox of multinational petroleum production is that it generates great wealth while generating even greater poverty. No place in the world illustrates this paradox more clearly than Nigeria. Despite being the wealthiest country on the African continent and despite wielding significant political, economic, and military influence over its neighbours, Nigeria's economy has contracted rather than expanded over the past three decades. The country's absolute poverty rate (the percentage of the population living on less than a dollar a day1) soared from 9 per cent in 1970 to 46 per cent in 1998. Yet while most Nigerians have been sliding into destitution, the political and economic elites of the country have grown ever richer in most cases, obscenely so.2 Nearly every penny of Nigeria's ill-dispersed wealth comes from petroleum, and, at present, the oil industry is the only part of the Nigerian economy that hasn't largely collapsed.3 Oil accounts for 90 per cent of Nigeria's foreign exchange and 80 per cent of government revenue. Fully half of this oil revenue is generated by the Shell Petroleum Development Company (spdc), a joint venture of Royal Dutch/Shell and the government-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (nnpc). Not surprisingly, the Ogoni people objected to wallowing in poverty while multinational corporations and government elites grew rich on resources drained from Ogoni lands. The Ogonis also publicly and vociferously accused Shell of permanently devastating their environment.4 Although Shell acknowledges environmental problems in the Niger delta and the oil industry's contribution to them, the company dismisses as "distorted and inaccurate" all allegations of environmental devastation.5 Shell says that it is deeply coHunt, J. Timothy is the author of 'Politics of Bones Dr. Owens Wiwa And the Struggle for Nigeria's Oil', published 2006 under ISBN 9780771041587 and ISBN 0771041586.