Ken Saro-Wiwa, environmental activist, fought against the oil multinational Shell. History has proved him right: his land, today, is devastated.
On 10 November 1995, Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was killed, at the conclusion of a trial widely considered a farce by much of the international community and by human rights organisations. Saro-Wiwa, a writer and poet, had denounced the serious environmental damage caused by oil extraction in the Niger Delta.
The saddest observation, more than twenty years on, is that the risks denounced by the activist have become reality: the local population is increasingly affected by health problems, and lives in conditions of poverty, surrounded by pipelines and oil platforms. As reported by the French Observatory on Multinationals, "despite promises to clean up areas polluted by extraction activities, Shell continues to pocket profits whose social and environmental cost is paid by the population." "We live in a hell of poverty. Plant and animal growth has been halted. And the fish are dead," one of the thirty million inhabitants of the region told Amnesty International in April 2008.
A scientific study carried out on the ground in 2011 by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) painted a dire picture: cleaning up the damage caused by oil would require thirty years of remediation. Life expectancy in the area, moreover, no longer exceeds 40 years, and 75 per cent of the population has no access to drinking water. "In the meantime," the French Observatory continues, "Shell recorded profits of 13 billion euros in 2014. In Nigeria it manages fifty oil fields and a pipeline network, in many cases old and poorly maintained, stretching five thousand kilometres. The oil spills recorded since 2007 number 1,500 according to the Anglo-Dutch company itself. And many more according to Amnesty."
Saro-Wiwa knew that this would be the future for Nigerians. He had the courage to speak out, on behalf of the Ogoni minority, a people particularly affected by the activities of the oil companies. He organised protests and demanded compensation from the government. He founded a movement, the Mosop, and succeeded in organising massive popular demonstrations. He was arrested for the first time in 1993, and then released, partly thanks to pressure from the international community. But a year later he was arrested again, this time on a charge of incitement to murder: for this he was sentenced to death, and hanged in the prison where he was held.
Accused of having supported the regime in order to have Saro-Wiwa executed (along with eight other activists), Shell agreed in 2009 to pay 15.5 million dollars in compensation, in order to settle a lawsuit brought before a New York court. In early 2015, in the context of separate proceedings brought in the United Kingdom, the company agreed to pay 84 million dollars in compensation to fishermen in the Bodo region, who were affected by repeated oil spills in 2008 and 2009 (in the video, the appeal of an activist recorded in 2012). But no sum of money can ever fully compensate for the ecological catastrophe.