Over the past few years, the fossil fuel industry’s focus has increasingly been on Africa, where it is fast-tracking new fossil fuel development and infrastructure. Proponents of this buildout often talk about how fossil fuels will lift Africa out of poverty, providing both development funding and the money necessary to adapt to climate change. They speak of rampant “energy poverty” in Africa, a term used to describe lack of access to consistent power. It’s a real indictment of international climate diplomacy that less developed countries are reliant on extractive industry for climate adaptation, rather than the money long promised in the form of climate reparations or loss and damage funds. But it’s also unlikely that fossil fuel development will actually pay off.

Nigeria, the country with the oldest, largest, and most established fossil fuel industry on the African continent, is a prime example. Nigeria currently has the world’s lowest energy access rates, and while oil and gas has made a handful of elites wealthy, that benefit has not extended to the vast majority of Nigerians. They 

 experienced the lion’s share of contaminated water and soil from oil spills, though. All of which has driven decades of protest against oil drilling projects in the Niger delta, and a corresponding backlash to that activism from both government and oil majors.

Next year marks the 30-year anniversary of the killing of the Ogoni 9—activists who had fought against Shell Oil’s activities in Nigeria for years, and were arbitrarily hung after an unlawful arrest and unjust trial. Shell has been accused of being complicit in those murders, though never held accountable. In the decades since, despite facing intense and sometimes violent repression, activists have continued to shine a light on the destruction the fossil fuel industry has imposed upon Nigeria.

Today, Ugochi Anyaka-Oluigbo takes us to Ogoniland, to bring us the story of those activists’ long fight, and some of their recent wins.

That story’s coming up right after this quick break. I’m Amy Westervelt, and this is Drilled.

Sound of rain drops and singing (The rains and voices, water speaks )

It is a cloudy day in Bori, an Ogoni community in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. Hundreds of people are gathered here to remember the struggle, suffering, and killing of thousands of Ogoni people in a brutal government-supported crackdown of peaceful demonstrations in the 1990s. Ogoni people were non-violently protesting the devastating impacts of oil exploration by Shell Nigeria, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell oil company, on their land.

Carnival music in the background. (The people march)

Every Nov 10, memorial events like this one are held in several cities across the world. It was on this day in 1995 that activists Kenule Saro-Wiwa, John Kpuine, Dr. Barinem Kiobel, Paul Levera, Baribon Bera, Nordu Eawo -(AIWO), Saturday Dobee, Daniel Gbooko and Felix Nuate were executed under the military leadership of Gen. Sani Abacha. Their arrest and the hasty judgment were backed by Shell.

Sound of traditional music. (The cultural group)

Marching to Ken Saro-Wiwa's home and final resting place, children and adults are holding banners with messages like ‘’Leave Ogoni oil in the ground, Climate Justice Now, Shell out of Niger Delta and their new slogan for Shell - Shell bringing hell to the Niger Delta since 1956’’. On their way, they are stopped by police officers standing in front of the Bori police station. After a brief stand-off, the activist  Mbani Friday, addresses the crowd.

‘’Greater upon greater Ogoni people, Greatest Gbo, I want release. Today is the freedom fighter day. Today is the day that ogoni people declare as an international freedom fighter day. Today makes it 28 years since the killing of our father, our hero, Ken Sarowiwa and 8 others. Today, the youth are coming together to mobilize and demand Ogoni Justice. Our father, late Sarowiwa is alive. Ogoni people, United, can never be defeated’’.

Since the discovery of oil in Ogoni in the late 1950s, the region has produced about $30 billion worth of oil. It also experienced 6817  oil spills, between 1976 and 2001 alone, accounting for over 2 million barrels of pollution. The region’s economy previously relied on farming and fishing, activities the spills destroyed. The village of Goi, traditional fishing village, was declared unlivable. Inhabitants had to evacuate but were never properly resettled or given any compensation or adequate support. The money taken from their land did not translate to development, a better life, inclusivity, wealth, or development. It did not bring the basics like water, electricity, hospitals, good roads or schools either. As the Ogoni people began to assert their rights, their protests were quelled using force, a pattern that continues today. Any opposition to oil production is seen as a threat not only to the economy, but to the political system. Offices of environmental rights organizations have been raided, journalists targeted and in five years,  thousands of Ogonis were detained or beaten by the Rivers State Internal Security Task Force - ISTF-  a military body specially created the Abacha administration in 1994, to suppress the protests organized by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP. Shell provided the ISTF with logistical support and even rewarded them . Once, Shell paid the commander at the time,, Major Paul Okuntimo, and 25 of his troops, an “honorarium” as a “show of gratitude and motivation for a sustained favorable disposition.

The response from the authorities like the police, whenever there is a protest against oil companies, it is always different from how they respond to other protests.

Fyneface Dumnamene  is an environmental activist from Ogoni.

In 1993, the government banned public gatherings and declared that disturbances of oil production were treasonable offenses. As the military invaded communities the killings which had started in 1990 became even more brutal. About 4000 Ogoni’s were murdered and women, some as young as 13 years old were raped by the marauding soldiers. Hundreds of those who were able to escape to neighboring countries like Benin republic, have not returned to their ancestral homes since then. Benin hosts a community of over 1200 Ogoni refugees living in camps, under terrible conditions. They remain stateless and unable to integrate into Beninois society. They are also unable to work, so they depend on handout by, Amnesty International Cotonou,  generous natives and churches.

In 1999, Fineboy Kuku, a former print journalist and member of MOSOP escaped to Benin Republic. He lives in a cramped single room with his wife and four children.  He spoke to me from exile.

 I have been in Benin Republic for about 23 years today. The basic reason why I ran away from Ogoni was due to my political belief in the ideas of MOSOP.  Suppressions and a threat to my life, so I had to sneak out of the country. Not that i ran openly. I fled into the Republic of Benin for fear of my life which has persistent. As i got into Benin in 99, i got registered with the UNHCR - the UN high commission for refugees.

Unfortunately because of the language barrier and other cultural barriers, we were unable to fit in but for the sake of life, we endure whatever we pass through day after day and year after year.

I am here to safeguard us from being killed. Those activities arrested during the time we fled, most of them have been silently killed. either you are tagged as a cult member or whatever, you will be executed without question. some were killed even when they were kept in prison or the station they were kept for a long time. I am better off here being alive no matter the deprivation, no matter the suffering we pass through. Concerning the land use act and the petroleum act law, these were draconian laws that were formulated by the then military head of state by general obasanjo in 1978.

the land use act states that whatever is extracted up the surface of the land, belongs to the land owner but anything 7ft an below belongs to the government.

 Leaving his wife and baby, Kuku said he fled to Benin republic 23 years ago after the targeting of Ogoni youths who were in support of MOSOP. Many of those he knew got killed or imprisoned. He also talks about the Land Use Decree of 1978 and the Petroleum act of 1969 that hands land and everything underneath it to the Nigerian government, a continuation of a colonial policy. The laws give everything to the government and technically, to oil companies.

That law is very oppressional… It is this law that denied people of the the land resources imbedded in their land.

The starvation we go through here most of the times is because we have been discharged from our localities where we used to stay peacefully as ogoni people. The suffering here is hard. You can see many of us are sick and so many died here.

We organize ourselves to do menial jobs. We don’t even have official documents of united nations refugees or asylees which would have enhanced us to fit in the system or be considered for any meager or legal employment.

Kuku said that many asylum applications were rejected because of Benin republic’s decision to stop granting refugee status to Ogonis in Benin since the year 2000. In 2004, the UNHCR decided that Ogoni refugees can now return safely to Nigeria since military rule has ended but for those like Kuku, home is still not safe enough.

We born our children, most of them without papers.

What pursued me from home is still there. Presently, if you go to Ogoni, you will not see any protest no matter the trauma, no matter the oppression, no matter the killing. What is called cultism is the legal method government has employed to kill the youth, the youth are their prime target now.

Angered by the resource injustice and pollution, armed groups started attacking oil installations and kidnapping oil staff in the early 2000s. This morphed into cultism and gang violence. Kuku says that the government still targets Ogoni youths but this time, under the guise of tackling cultism and violence.

Returning home, I cannot see it in the near future the hope of going back. we miss home. Everybody misses home. Even most times, our children ask , ‘’are we from this country’’. they ask a lot of questions. We miss home. Refugee is not a sweet name to bear. It involves a lot of trauma, so much pain and pressure.

Nigerian security forces had sometimes also arrested, beaten or intimidated relatives of activists. In November 1997, the mother and sister of Ogoni student activist Sunny Kogbo were detained.

Why my wife fled also in the year 2000, to meet me up in Cotonou, Benin Republic, my wife was left at home because by the time, that night, there was no way that I could give them proper information. But on her own, when the security kept coming to ask for her husband, that I must be produced, else they will take her in my position, it was then that she complained to some of my work colleagues that were closer to us both in Bori and Portharcourt, who organised for her to run towards Benin Republic, to look for her husband since there was no way, no hope of brining me back because if i am seen, they were all aware of what will happen to me.  So my wife had to run after me, with the kid. One early sunday morning, she arrived here. If she was still at home, maybe she would have died by now on her own or being killed ’’

From the 1990s till 2023, physical protests in Nigeria have become increasingly dangerous. In May 2023, a bill that provides a five-year sentence for illegal protest passed for a second reading in Nigeria’s House of Representatives. This comes on the heels of the End-SARS protests that rocked Nigeria in 2020  . It’s not the SARS you might be thinking of; in Nigeria, SARS is an acronym for a police task force called the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. Beginning on october 4 and through the next few weeks, thousands of Nigerian youths took to the streets to protest decades of police brutality and extrajudicial killings often committed by the squad.

During the protests, the Nigerian Army opened fire on unarmed peaceful protesters and killed 56 of them, according to Amnesty International. The brutality of the End-Sars protests left a mark in the hearts of disgruntled Nigerians, especially the younger population. So much so that when the current President,Bola Ahmed Tinubu in his first speech, announced the removal of Fuel subsidy, an assistance provided by the government to reduce the price of fuel for consumers, Nigerians braced for suffering instead of protesting like they did in 2012 when former President Goodluck Jonathan made the same announcement.

With protests becoming increasingly deadly, aggrieved people in oil polluted communities have found other ways to get justice. Some seek it in the courts. But not Nigerian courts. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the idea that a multinational firm can be held accountable in its home country for its actions oversees, both the UK Supreme Court and the Dutch High Court have agreed to hear cases against Shell brought by Nigerian communities. In 2015, thousands of community members from the Bodo region sued Shell over the impact of chronic spills in the area and received a settlement of more than 50 million pounds. And even in 2023, post-Brexit, the UK Supreme Court agreed to hear a case filed on behalf of thousands of Nigerian fishermen against Shell.

Elisabeth Driscoll is a law student at the University of Bristol and JURIST’s UK Chief of Staff.

“in that landmark decision being made in the  UK, all cases that are involving Nigerians wanting to sue Shell are likely to go to the UK first in the future. Um, especially if they're of this size, you know, um, so we're unlikely to see any more Dutch cases, um, or Nigerian cases because.

There's now a relationship set up between the courts and this judgment.

In January 2021, after 13 years of litigation, a Dutch court ruled that Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary is responsible for spills that polluted Goi, Oruma and Ikot Ada Udo communities. The company paid 15 million euros in compensation in early, 2023, to be shared among the three communities. The 2011 UNEP report on Ogoni indicates that 1 Billion USD is needed for the cleanup of Ogoni pollution.

Eric Dooh from Goi, is among the farmers who won the case.

: Some people have not received their own due to some unexpected issues that arises because of wrong information from their banks… Not everyone has gotten their compensation but for me, I have gotten my own, majority of the people have gotten their own.

The money that was paid was used for the renovation of houses, some people used their won in acquiring landed property… The money was collated and they used it in buying land, where they will now dwell on. Some used their own for business, small businesses that will sustain them. Some will not use it judiciously, also. This money, as i speak with you, is very small and cannot sustain us. the swamp is where our source of revenue, our source of livelihood comes from. our people solely depended on fishing and farming. And because the streams and the swamps have been polluted by crude oil, where will they go, where will the sustainability come from? Our sustainability comes from the land and the sea. It is only when the government will maintain their facilities and ensure that there is no further pollution and ensure that the livelihood of the people are restored, the remediation activities take place that is when we can now sustain what has been given to us.  Is not adequate, it is not sustainable, at all. . It could not settle the livelihoods that have been impacted. It could not settle the problem of restoration and remediation of our environment.’’

Kentebe Ibiarido is the coordinator of Oil Watch International. His organization campaigns against fossil exploration in Ogoni.

 I was elated. Because for me, it was a judgment for the people, it was a judgment for the communities, it was a judgment, for the environment. It is a clear understanding that you can not cheat the people forever. If the government will not stand with the people but with the multinationals, one day, the will be in the dockyard.  Justice is gradually being served.Like Ken Sarowiwa said, that he is not the only one on trial. Shell and other multinationals are also on trial. And as I speak to you, the trial of multinationals all over the world is gaining traction and the communities are winning, all over the world.

In my reporting, I have visited Ogoni, I have watched fishermen toil for hours and return with only a handful of fish, oily nets, and broken hearts. I have watched them open crabs or fish to reveal oil in their guts. No living thing has a survival chance there.  Potable water in some of the communities is not-existent. When a tap is opened, the smell of crude oil fills the air. The average life expectancy there is 41.

As Shell prepares to sell off its subsidiary and exit Nigeria’s onshore exploration to focus offshore, I wonder what the fate of polluted communities would be.

The spills are not just in Ogoni, but throughout the Niger Delta. In May 2023, a report published by the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commision fingered Shell and other oil majors in massive pollution in Bayelsa state, also in Nigeria's Niger Delta. According to the report Shell, Eni, Chevron, Total and ExxonMobil, spilled at least 110,000 barrels of oil in Bayelsa over the past 50 years. Like the UNEP report on Ogoni that specified about 30 years for a cleanup, the Bayelsa spills will require 12 years and 12 billion dollars to be remediated. It means that more cases will likely make it to the courts.

Ebere Akwuebu is an environmental lawyer and activist. She spoke to me from the COP28 climate conference in Dubai where there were speculations that ironically, new oil deals were being signed as the conference was underway.

 ‘’There were so many speculations as to the real agenda of the COP and why UAE was the host country for COP because of course, we know that UAE is an oil rich. But these are all speculations. If we say we want to phase out fossil fuel, coming from the oil and gas industry, then there will be higher financial commitment from the developed countries to the developing countries. And will the funds come in grants? If you are giving us loans, the country is presently under recession. But looking at it from the perspective of whether there will be increased litigations in the oil and gas sector. Unless oil and gas is phased out in Nigeria, there definitely will keep on being litigation issues, incidences of pollution, incidences of environmental degradation, and of course, people will keep suing oil companies.’’

Oil deals at a climate conference, even as Shell fights to resume oil exploration in Ogoni. Akpobari Celestine Nkabari, coordinator of Ogoni Solidarity Forum, says that the government and oil companies are trying in different ways to stifle the voices of local people. In his words,

The plan of the government was to make Ogoni land an oil field, where no human will live. But after their execution and they saw the international outcry and condemnation, the soldiers were later withdrawn from Ogoniland after two years, and that is why some of us are still alive. Things are worse than in the days of Ken Sarowiwa because there is hardly a week that will pass without any serious oil spill.  severe leakages, in fact there is hardly a week pass without any serious oil spill. Don’t forget that the transitional pipeline, the pipeline that conveys every crude oil produced in the Niger Delta to Bonny export terminal passes through Ogoni land and so every time, you see explosions, you see leakages, the well heads of the oil companies are still here. They do not carry out routine checks so from time to time, there are leakages and spills.

Nkabari says one way that Shell and the government deal with protest in the country today is to try to turn some of the more vocal leaders in the environmental movement into allies, to divide and conquer. It’s a common tactic deployed by the fossil fuel industry all over the world, as is another tactic used in Nigeria: infiltration.

As we speak, the movement has been infiltrated by the oil companies to the extent that we have five different factions and five presidents. The only way to kill a movement is to polarize the movement. I

He says the military and judicial systems have been corrupted as well.

They use the military to chase people, they adopt divide and rule, then compel you, you go to court and they will keep bribing the judges, bribing the court until the litigant will die, or people get tired, or they all get sick and can’t go to court again.

Infact, the current president of Nigeria, President Tinubu, appointed a former MOSOP president Ledum Mitee, the only man that survived the hangman, he went on trial with Ken Sarowiwa. He was the president that took over from Ken Sarowiwa, he has just been appointed, on no other board, but the NNPC board, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation

Just to make sure you caught that: in late 2023, the president of Nigeria appointed Ledum Mite, a man who stood trial with Ken Sarowiwa and took over as president of MOSOP after the Ogoni 9 were executed…to the board of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

but we are waiting to fight them. They have spent millions of dollars bribing people. They want to kick start oil production without addressing the legitimate issues that the Ogoni people, that is enshrined in the Ogoni bill of rights.

In 2005, the Living Memorial—an art installation created from a life-sized bus – was commissioned by the UK activist collective Platform ,  and designed by Nigerian-British artist Sokari Douglas Camp to highlight the importance of transportation in environmental debate.In 2015, it was sent as a gift to Ogoni people to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of the Ogoni 9. Alongside anniversary fliers designed to commemorate the event, it was seized by Nigerian customs and the Director of Secret Service, DSS.

The bus, which had been on display in the UK for nine years, had Saro Wiwa’s name on the side and the names of the eight  other men inscribed on oil drums on top of the bus, along with a quote from Saro-Wiwa: “I ACCUSE THE OIL COMPANIES OF PRACTISING GENOCIDE AGAINST THE OGONI.” In what has been termed a move to suppress the memory of the martyred activists, it was seized for its ‘political value,’. It is seen as a symbol of protest.

 ‘’The bus did not commit any offense, it is just an art work. The former head of customs, Colonel Hammeed Ali was the only military officer that sat on the kangaroo tribunal that sentenced Ken Sarowiwa to death.

When you learn that the head of customs who kept blocking the bus happened to have been the only military officer involved in sentencing Ken Saro Wiwa to death in 1995, his decision to block the bus suddenly takes on more meaning.

And so everything in the name of Ken Saro Wiwa we were to not be honored. He does not know how to separate his personal biases from his work as head of customs, Nigeria. The same people that sent the bus, sent some fliers, the boxes containing the fliers were also seized by the DSS, a different agency of government. Common papers simply because, we would use the fliers for the commemoration.

He says the government seems to be afraid that anything celebrating Ken Saro Wiwa will just inspire the Ogoni to keep fighting, and that's the last thing the government wants.

We have been pushed to the wall. We have to take our destiny in our hands, if we see death, we take, if we see life, we take. We are not afraid of what the oppressor will throw at us. They have divided our ranks, they have weaponised hunger.

The government has used all of its power to fight against its own people in Ogoni, on behalf of foreign oil companies.

The oil companies can not do without the military and the police. In 1990, the community people went to the gates of shell to beg for water, they called in riot policemen that came in to kill people. Out of fear, the community people ran to the palace of the king. These men got in to the palace, set the palace on fire, they killed the king, killed his wife and children and everyone that arrived there. I have been arrested by military men. I can’t forget when my self, Nnimmo Bassey and other comrades were there and before we knew it, one truck load of soldiers, appeared and picked us up, they did not tell us where but before they picked phone from us, we had communicated to journalists. They saw it and said ‘’ these people you arrested  to are important people. we were eventually released. I don't know if they would have killed us. The government gave them powers to carry arms’’.

In 2016, Nigeria’s National Assembly asked the customs office to release the bus. The service flouted the directive, so the Ogoni Solidarity Forum-Nigeria and Social Action filed a suit in a Federal high court. I reached out to the Nigeria Customs service to get their comment on the bus, but they did not send back any reply.  In June 2023, after Colonel Hameed Ali left his post as Comptroller General of the Nigerian Customs Service, a court in Lagos ordered that the bus be released. Celestine was happy. He imagined that it would be released right on time to be fully displayed on Nov 10, 2023.

They had plans to dress the bus in traditional clothes and  honour it in a parade.

The bus will be on a truck. As we tie wrapper on the waist of important people, that’s how the bus will be tie a cloth. We will dress the bus traditionally, we will take the bus as a human being and traditional dances , people will follow this bus, like a carnival. it will take like three days.

But again, he was disappointed, as were his Ogoni kinsmen. The bus did not make an appearance on this 28th anniversary. The Nigerian customs did not release the bus despite the court order.

Exiled in far away USA, DineBari Augustine Kpuinen, has never joined the memorial event in Ogoni. He is the younger brother of one of the Ogoni 9. He fled to Benin in 1996 and then to the USA three years later.

 My elder brother John Kpuinen was so dear to me, he was like a father because our father left when i was like 12 years old. He was the very reason that I joined the movement. We were very close. I was a good christian. Paul Okuntimu told me that he was going to kill me,........that was how I escaped the hang man. If not, they would have killed me too.

pull up music or chanting from before to bring people back to the anniversary celebration

The night before the anniversary, in the city of Port Harcourt the crowd had gathered in front of Sarowiwa's house, a two-storey building situated a few meters between the Port Harcourt Prisons (where the Ogoni 9 were incarcerated) on the right, and Port Harcourt Cemetery (where they were buried before Saro-Wiwa’s exhumation) on the left. Ken Saro-Wiwa lived between the two facilities that sealed his fate. As they lit candles and prayed, Laureate of the Right Livelihood Award and one of Time Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment Nnimmo Bassey, spoke to the new generation of protesters.

 ’’There are a whole lot of young people here who were not born when this even happened but they have lived the experience of what led to the struggle. The children who were born after, those who were born even today, they are living in the Niger Delta where all those harms are still happening. This is very significant to remind the people that the struggle is not over. The young people must be engaged in the struggle.’’

 In October 2023, another oil spill occurred in K-Dere community of Gokana local government area of Rivers State. It took Shell five days to stop the gushing crude. Shell had denied that its old pipelines were responsible for spills.

As we were producing this episode, I heard some news from Ogoni.

So they are supposed to inform us. They are supposed to consult the people and tell them that, okay, if we are doing routine maintenance, which is necessary that they should do because it is the lack of that that make oil spillages destroy our environment because of ruptured pipe and  pipe  that were laid in the fifties’

Today, Kpuinen works for the organization that Ken Saro Wiwa started, MOSOP. In February, several indigenous people from the K Dere community  reported seeing men out working on oil pipes in the region. Shell is selling off its onshore business in Nigeria, so no one was sure what was going on especially as security guarding the sites were aggressive towards curious visitors. Within a few days it was confirmed that they were working for Shell, repairing pipes in the region.

So if they are coming to repair or change the pipes. They should negotiate or consult the people and let them know what they are coming to do in their place. Well, that is not done.  Um, they just one morning wake up and started digging people's land and property, destroying what belongs to people without consultation.’’

‘’All those things are unacceptable.  Um, they look, it means that they don't regard us as people. There is no respect.

No respect from Shell, but also no respect from the Nigerian government, he says.

Government don't own Oguni. There was Oguni before Nigeria. In fact, Oguni existed hundreds of years before the, the contraption called Nigeria came in. And that was just about a hundred years ago.  While Oguni have lived long, longer time, longest. Before that Nigeria,  we were forced into Nigeria. We were living on our own.

There is no any nationality in Nigeria that can lay claim  to Ogoni that they were ruling the Ogoni people before the British government came in  and, and I know that we are under the people that have a very strong story that the British can always tell about. Because of the resistance. Three times they tried to come through, um, colonize Ogoni people and they failed.

 On the land and in the courts, the Ogoni are still resisting today.

Transcription

Shell announced in late 2023 that it would be shutting down all of its onshore activities in Nigeria and concentrating its efforts offshore. It leaves behind poisoned water, multiple political and economic crises, and a country that is measurably worse off today than when its oil industry began. Meanwhile the government continues to target environmental activists. 

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Nearly 30 Years After the Ogoni 9 Tragedy, Nigerians Are Still Resisting Oil Colonialism

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