“Leaders
become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to
empower other”-John Maxwell

 This November 10th, marks
the 20th anniversary of Ken Saro Wiwa’s death. Certainly in the UK, the media
delivered a number of columns honouring him.

 I did the same thing three years
ago. Ken was executed on trumped up charges and was executed with fellow Ogoni
activists. Ken and his fellow Ogoni activists drew the world’s attention to the
Abacha government and its inability to defend the rights of the Ogoni against
the exploration and threatened the profits of Shell’s operations in the oil
producing Delta.

 Of course, this was not very
welcomed by those who directly benefited from corrupt activities by turning the
other way, while the Ogoni people suffer as a result of the direct pollution of
their land. Ken’s execution marked a seminal moment in Nigeria’s relationship
in international relations and Nigeria was suspended from the commonwealth.

 In 2011, a UN report vindicated
his environmental and political stance and criticised Shell and the Nigerian
Government for the pollution of the Ogoniland. The report indicates that it
will take $1 billion and up to 30 years to clear up of polluted areas. Talking
about his father, Ken Jr., said;”My father went to the gallows an innocent man.
He loved his country but refused to remain silent while his land and his people
were being exploited. His real “crime” was in exposing the double standards of
Shell, who had been quietly drilling oil for years in Nigeria, earning good
profits for its shareholders but leaving the host community wallowing in levels
of pollution that he described unflinchingly as “devastation”, pointing out
that the operations in Ogoniland betrayed Shell’s own global standards”.

 Ken Saro Wiwa, has never been a
man to sit and do nothing, he was committed to the welfare of his people and
Nigeria in general . He once said: “The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he
cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society’s weaknesses, its
ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved shaping its present and
its future.”   He did exactly that.

 Permit me to share my tribute to
the man of the people, Ken Saro Wiwa. He was a writer, artist, journalist, and
television producer and became the President of the Association of Nigerian
Authors for three years until 1991, when he decided to devote himself entirely
to the nonviolent struggles of his fellow Ogoni people. He was born Kenule
Benson Tsaro-Wiwa in Bori, in 1941, the son of Jim Beesom Wiwa, a businessman
and community chief and a farmer.

 Mr Saro-Wiwa, was a larger than
life character, with trademark pipe and safari top, you could not miss him. He
was engaging and erudite and truly, a man of the people. Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., in
his book of his father, IN THE SHADOW OF A SAINT: A SON’S JOURNEY TO UNDERSTAND
HIS FATHER’S LEGACY (2001), described him as truly special that “he walked at
seven months, and his parents doted on him because he was, for the first seven
years of his life, their only child.”

 Excerpts from: Requiem for Ken
Saro-Wiwa

I am not surprised at the verdict
of guilt returned on Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogonis last Tuesday. I had
forseen it as clearly indicated in my column of Sunday 8 January 1995 and
Sunday 24 September 1995 respectively as reproduced below:

“This is not requiem yet for Ken
Saro-Wiwa. But you wake up one day to find the
inimitable writer and social conscience pricker has been murdered. The pity of
it is that it would be late to do something about it and the world again will
modify, by many notches up, its contempt for all of us.

But then Ken would have left his
footprints on the sands of time. We shall always remember him as a playwright,
as a novelist; as the man who made us laugh at our foibles; as a man who
directed our gaze and our attention at the plight of the oppressed majorities
and at the game played by multi-national companies game that does not recognise
our dignity as human beings. Or as anything at all.

 The ground is being prepared for
murder. We have now been officially informed that Ken and some others will
appear before a tribunal on the charge of murder. Murder trials are too common
place to be unique. Outstanding, upstanding and wicked men and women have
featured in famous trials. What would make the Ogoni trial unique would not be
because Ken is famous (and rich! To borrow his Basi & Company slang), but
because of the deviation attendant thereon.

 For a case of ordinary murder
which can and should be tried by ordinary courts, a tribunal has been set up.
That takes the action beyond the civil to the military. The immediate example
that can be quoted is the Zango-Kataf trial and we were all witness to the
injustices perpetrated.

 Verdict from Nigerian tribunal
cannot usually be appealed. Or appeals lie only at the courts of the
persecutors-Supreme Military Council, Provisional or Permanent Ruling Council
or whatever name they may be called. And these bodies have not been famous for
charity.

Dauda Komo, Rivers State
Governor, has not done anything to lessen our suspicion. He had already
pronounced the accused guilty even before their trial.

Of the three tribunal trial
judges two were imported. If times were normal, something like that would raise
no eyebrow. But these are very uncertain times … very suspicious times.
Imported judges are suspect.

I have read a delegation of the
judges coming to inspect facilities and calling on Komo (who seizes every opportunity
to issue assurance which no one believes).

A new dimension has now been
added: The Guild of Editor has been invited to look around and see that the
Rivers Government can smell like nothing but roses.

And I have been reading some
highly tendentious nonsense in some of the papers.

What I find curious is the fact
it did not take judicial notice of the published fact that Ambassador E A
Azikiwe and Professor A H Yadudu appeared before the Committee on Elimination
of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on August 10 and 11, 1995.

Ambassador Azikiwe was reported
to have pronounced Saro-Wiwa guilty of murder – a fact which Professor Yadudu,
Legal Adviser to General Sani Abacha, was reported to have corroborated. There
has been no refutal from official quarters about the proceedings and it cannot
be that these officers of Government are blissfully unaware that their
assertion can be prejudicial to the case of the accused.

There is a civilized norm about
justice: it is never to pronounce an accused guilty until courts has found so.