For those of who had thought that the out-of-court settlement that has seen Royal Dutch Shell agree to pay $15.5 million to 10 Ogoni families is a classic example of too little too late, insult was last week added to injury by two models of irresponsible social commentary: Donu Kogbara (“Ogoni: The forgotten four”, The Guardian, Monday June 15), and Comfort Obi (“Thinking of the Ogoni Four”, The Guardian, Wednesday June 17). It is impossible to know whether the two writers compared notes before composing their articles, but such is the dangerous illiteracy exhibited by both that they could as well have drawn directly from the same perceptual current.
Ordinarily one should not dignify pieces like theirs with a response, but what is at stake here is of greater moment than mere professional etiquette. What is at stake, lest there be any doubt, is the sacred memory of nine human and environmental rights activists, callously executed by the murderous military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha, acting in connivance with Shell, the transnational oil behemoth. Also at stake is the history of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), its valiant activism, and the daring and heroism of Ken Saro-Wiwa, its famous leader. The danger we face is not just of these memories being carelessly desecrated, but also of history being hijacked and profoundly distorted. That is why the casual revisionism of Donu Kogbara and Comfort Obi (and others like them who are still in the closet) must be challenged, and robustly too.
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On the face of it, the presumed social project of Ms Kogbara and Ms Obi seems quite agreeable, even logical. All they are after is that the current “perceptional imbalance” be corrected. They suggest that overwhelming attention has been paid to the ‘Ogoni nine’ to the detriment of the ‘Ogoni four’, the quartet of chiefs (Edward Kobani, Albert Badey, and Simon and Theophilus Orage) whose tragic lynching in May 1994 unleashed the chain of events that led to the eventual hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogonis. In addition, they seem to want, and quite rightly, that any attempt at comprehensive reconciliation in Ogoni land not exclude the families and descendants of the murdered men. But it is when the two commentators discuss MOSOP, Shell, the Abacha dictatorship and, most poignantly, Ken Saro-Wiwa, that they betray their real intentions.
Their account of what transpired between MOSOP and Shell, and between Shell and the Nigerian state, is disingenuous beyond belief. If Donu Kogbara and Comfort Obi are to be believed, MOSOP was slowly but steadily negotiating its way to a genuine and everlasting accommodation with Shell (on behalf of the Ogoni people of course) before Ken Saro-Wiwa and his militant rabble derailed negotiations and plunged the whole community into disarray. Shell is not a polluter of land and water in Ogoni land and the rest of the Niger Delta, but, according to Ms Kogbara, “a victim of the relentlessly effective Ken PR bandwagon”. As for the hangings of November 10 1995, Shell absolutely “did NOT urge Abacha to dispatch Ken to his Maker”. But what about Ken? He is nothing but “a saint with a dodgy halo”. And so on, and so flatulently forth.
If this is not the story of the Ogoni struggle that you remember, your dilemma is understandable- it is because it is not the correct one. What Ms Kogbara and Ms Obi have been rehashing so thoughtlessly is the story of the Ogoni struggle according to Shell and, to some degree, the ruling elite of the Nigerian state. They are the latest in a generation of spin doctors, primarily inspired by the manipulations of Shell, and aided in all cases by a singular failure of the individual imagination. The tragedy of course is that for all their efforts, the Kogbaras and the Obis of this world are a profound disservice to both the ‘Ogoni four’ and the ‘Ogoni nine’. They advance the cause of neither and are a stain on the memory of both. In fact, they detract from the nobility of the continuing struggle, not just of the Ogoni as a whole, but the entire beleaguered people of Nigeria’s oil- bearing communities.
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To be sure, Ms Kogbara’s take on this matter is not altogether surprising. She once carelessly accused Ken of “incitement to murder” and has unashamedly proselytized for Shell even as its operations openly and continuously destroy the lives of people whose only sin is that oil was discovered at their backyard. Her tactic is simple and familiar. She invariably starts off by saying a few nice things about Ken (her uncle no less) and then goes on to systematically libel and malign him. Is there some quasi-oedipal regret going on here? A feeling of frustration perhaps at failure to measure up to a more esteemed and publicly celebrated uncle? We will never know for sure, but what we do know is that in her quest to de-compose Ken Saro-Wiwa, Donu Kogbara has never allowed either good conscience or the facts of the matter to detain her.
If Donu Kogbara is an envious niece, Comfort Obi offers a greater puzzle, as it is not exactly clear what she hopes to gain by her specious intervention. Attention for her failed newsmagazine? Perhaps. But I doubt whether anyone will be rushing to read the next edition of The Source after the mess of an essay that she published. Attention for the ‘Ogoni four’? Again, I hope not, for it must be a sad day indeed when there is no one of stature left, but moral midgets like Ms Obi, to make a case for the killed chiefs. Which leaves us with one final conjecture: Throughout a career that never really took off, Comfort Obi has never come across a wretched cause that she did not fancy.
The next time either Shell or its apologists think of violating the memory of the dead, they should bear the following in mind: that nothing will make us forget that Lt. Colonel Paul Okuntimo, the scourge of the Ogoni people (a plague on his house, Amen!) was on Shell’s payroll; that Shell bribed prosecution witnesses to testify against Ken and his men; and that they did all this with the active collaboration of a homicidal tyrant. It is the reason the guns are still booming in the Niger Delta, more than a decade after that series of unfortunate events. Is Comfort Obi so irreparably dim that she cannot make that simple connection?
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