Well known for his Saturday column in the Globe and Mail, as well as an environmental activist for Nigeria, Ken Wiwa spoke at the Sanford Fleming stage with a group of U of T students about environmental and social justice. At the March 7 talk presented by the University of Toronto Environmental Resource Network, Mr. Wiwa shared the traumatic story of his father’s execution as a political prisoner ten years ago in Nigeria and the ripple effect it has had on his life and work ever since.
Remembering the day of his father Ken Saro-Wiwa’s hanging, Mr. Wiwa related the battle between his Ogani community, the Shell Corporation, and the Nigerian military government over Nigeria’s oil resources. Ken’s father struggled on behalf of his community to gain a fair share of oil profits but his efforts were in vain. Instead the area became a polluted compost site surrounded by gas flares which imprinted themselves into his childhood memories. He related how that he “never knew anything different” from the perilous environment in the Niger Delta due to Shell’s oil drilling, and considered it an ordinary part of his childhood background.
Ken saw the bigger picture when his father’s death sentence was announced and, fresh out of university, he traveled to the Commonwealth and the UN to lobby against it, but to no avail. After his father was executed, he realized his community was being stripped of its valuable resources and getting nothing in return for its toll of lives.
Since November 10, 1995-the date the death sentence was carried out-Ken has held hopes of trumping the dominance of transnational corporations such as Shell and their exploitation of the oil resources of the Niger Delta. A recognizable face in the Commonwealth media from 1995 onwards, Mr. Wiwa has brought to the forefront Shell’s irresponsibility and the detrimental effect the corporation has left on his country.
Although the fight is far from over, since 1993 Shell no longer drills for oil from Wiwa’s community. But the communities where the oil came from in Nigeria still have extremely underfunded health care, education, and other basic services, even though Nigeria’s oil revenues from 1960s onward have totaled 600 billion. Therefore, Mr. Wiwa has continued to stress that Shell is guilty of the genocide of the Ogani community in the hopes of promoting awareness of the unethical tactics of large corporations and their logic of taking everything at the costs of the environment and its inhabitants.
In his address Mr. Wiwa commented that “a man dies when he stays silent in the face of oppression.” He stressed the importance of global civil society in getting involved to help preserve rights citizens have to their resources and to hold transnational corporations accountable for the impact they have on their environment. Wiwa’s talk was not only heartfelt and deeply personal, but it was a rude awakening for me that there remains democratic deficits in Nigeria as well as worldwide. It is time for the world’s second-largest superpower-civil society-to step up to the plate and take action.
