Today
is 22 years since the Nigerian state killed Ken Saro-Wiwa on the allegation of
murder of Ogoni Chiefs. Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried alongside other Ogoni leaders
and citizens, including Mr. Ledum Mittee for allegedly instigating and killing
their brothers. The death of those Ogoni chiefs was an unfortunate and
unexpected turn of event, occasioned by intolerable disagreement on the
strategies for the emancipation of Ogoni people.
This could be a
case of what behavioral scholars call ‘predictable surprise’. With ‘hindsight
bias’, one could say that the level of venom and angst in this strategic
contention would definitely lead to epic tragedy. But, in the thrills of
self-determination, no one would have expected the gruesome killing of those
who disagreed.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was
tried by a special military tribunal headed by the immediate Chief Judge of the
Federal High Court, Justice Ibrahim Auta, who was then a junior judge of the
Federal High Court, Lagos. Other members of the tribunal were Col Ali, former
Military Governor and now Comptroller General of Customs, and a senior judge
from Cross River State whose name I can’t easily recollect. The trial was my
closest and most insightful encounter with the Nigerian state.
I was a young
lawyer, barely two years from the Law School, when Ken’s lawyer and my
principal, Gani Fawehinmi, drafted me as co-counsel in the trial. The trial
became a ruse to put away a very costly irritation to the Nigerian state. As
one of the tribunal members explained to us, it was a strategic mistake that
the Nigerian state did not deal ruthlessly with the Ogoni ‘insolence and
provocation’ long ago. In his view, Abacha should have exterminated this
irritation. But, nevertheless, General Abacha got around doing what a ruthless
state gets to do: brutally put off the agitation.
The ‘persecution’
of the Ogoni leaders was expected but the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the
other accused persons-minus Mittee- was a real surprise. Both Ken Saro-wiwa and
Gani Fawehinmi knew the trial was a sham. As I explained to the Newsweek
magazine, the Auta tribunal was a ‘hangman’s court’.
In fact, Ken
Saro-wiwa, realizing that the trial was a predetermined extermination of the
dangerous Ogoni agitation, counseled Gani Fawehinmi not to put up a defence on
his behalf. In Ken’s view, the Nigerian state wanted to kill him after a sham
trial whose only redemption would be that such high caliber lawyers represented
him. Gani, understood that this Auta Tribunal was a ‘hangman’s court but
countered that we needed to push the Tribunal to serial errors to discredit the
trial. Thereafter, we would back down.
The defence
strategy was delivered up to the hilt. We so exposed the tribunal’s bias and
partiality that the envoy of the Law Society and the Bar Council in the UK
wrote a damning report of the trail. The Report resulted in worldwide
denunciation of the trial. But we missed an important point. Ken had asked me
whether I thought Abacha would execute him after conviction and sentence (we
knew that Auta and co would convict and sentence Ken and his comrades to
death).
I painted
scenarios and predicted that how Abacha would treat General Obasanjo and
Yaradua, two eminent leaders he had convicted for coup plotting in another
Kangaroo military tribunal, would determine his treatment of Ken & co. in
my flawed thinking, I believed that if Abacha listened to international outcry
and reduced the death sentence on Obasanjo and Yaradua to prison terms then we
should be sure he would put Ken into prison and not to the gallows. Then,
perhaps, Ken’s dream Nobel Prize could be on the way.
But we failed
woefully. I did not reckon that the Ogoni struggle is a different kettle of
fish. To the grand commanders of this unfair republic to challenge the unity of
Nigeria (a euphemism for challenging the neo-feudal foundations of the Nigerian
state) is the unpardonable sin. A coup plotter is pardonable. But the one who
puts his hands against the Lugardian knots pays dearly. Ken Saro-wiwa paid the
price for raising his voice in the manner in which Adaka Boro and the Biafran
soldiers did. It is a legendary irony that Ken Saro-wiwa thoroughly deprecated
Ojukwu and his comrades for foolishly rushing to self-determination instead of
parleying with the Nigerian state that was already murdering Igbos.
He even called
‘Ojukwu ‘inglorious braggart’, and queried the wisdom of the Igbo struggle. He
was not alone in this put-down of the Biafra insurrection. Prof Ali Mazrui
seriously lampooned the poet, Chris Okigbo, for abandoning poetry and taking up
arms to defend Biafra. I confronted Ken with this irony while he was in prison
and he gave me a copy of his ‘On a Darkling Plain’ to debunk allegation of Igbo
hatred. Obviously, he did not hate the Igbos. Like most of us he simply failed
to see the body in the corpse until death hit home.
About 25 years
after the Biafra revolt, Ken inspired a powerful Ogoni rebellion. About 22
years after the Ogoni rebellion was fiercely exterminated, the Nigerian army
moved again to the east to quell another insurrection against the Nigerian
state. The Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) hoisted another flag of a
separatist enclave (don’t forget that MOSSOP had Ogoni flag and Anthem). A
young man, Nnamdi Kanu, who, like Ken Saro-Wiwa, is privileged with good
education and quality of life, swore that he wanted either Biafra or death.
Nnamdi Kanu thinks that his Igbo people are being enslaved in Nigeria.
Ken thought
Nigeria turned Ogonis into hewers of woods and fetchers of water. Kanu believes
that the problem of his Igbo people is that they are enslaved by the Fulani
caliphate. Ken believed that the Nigerian military-business complex was
imprisoning Ogoni people. Both of them wanted some kind of out.
The pacification
of Ogoni was brutal and unfair. In the guise of restoring peace to a troubled
land and bringing murderers to justice the Nigerian state brutalized Ogoni and
dismantled one of the most vehement and revolutionary political agitations in
Nigeria. In his written address to the tribunal Ken Saro-wiwa warned that if
Nigeria rebuffed his peaceful agitation for environmental justice and political
self-determination, it would contend with violent challenge to its iniquitous
order. But Nigeria was not in the mood for reason. And as predicted, the Ijaws
took over from where the Ogoni left. Militants swarmed the Niger Delta and forever
changed Nigerian politics.
After Ken’s
execution, a Nigerian journalist, Adewale Adeoye, and myself decided to publish
a book on the Ogoni trial and the political future of Nigeria. In chapter 6 of
the proposed book I argued that the future of Nigeria after Ken Saro-wiwa
requires a rethinking of the federal system of government. I argued that until
we reconceive the Nigerian state on the line of democratic citizenship, without
subjecting the state to ethnic and religious competition and dominance, we could
lose the nation. In mimicry of the fabled but failed nation-building project in
Nigeria, we abandoned the book project. That was over a decade before the
present feverish clamor of restructuring and the thunderous chant-down of
‘Nigerian unity is non-negotiable’.
Presumably, we
have neatly dispatched off Nnamdi Kanu and his noisome pestilence through the
‘Operation Python Dance’, just the way we extirpated the Ogoni struggle through
the Rivers State Internal Security Committee of dreaded Col Okuntimo. The
clamor of the Biafran agitators has been drowned in the cacophony of bullets
and martial law. We have cured the disease but multiplied the virus. As we
ruthlessly fall down those who stand up to question the political fundaments of
the Nigerian state and refuse to deal with the issues they raise, we continue
to weaken the foundations of Nigeria’s sustainability.
The union grows
weaker and weaker after each successful expedition. The Nigerian unity is more
threatened today than in 1995 when Ken Saro-wiwa and his colleagues were hanged
for asking inconvenient questions. Yes, we dealt with them neatly but we did
not answer their queries. 22 years after we are still dealing ruthlessly with,
perhaps, a much more inconvenient and insolent query: the new Biafra self-determination
movement. It is now time to stop bolstering and bluffing, sit down and ask
really difficult question: why does the nation has to be severely threatened
every other decade? We can’t we secure the nation on something stronger than
individual and group aggrandizement? Can’t we form a less imperfect union?
Dr Sam Amadi, former chairman and chief executive of Nigerian
Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), was a defence counsel to Ken
Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders at the trial
