Ken Saro Wiwa

Some of these pro-government elements and aristocrats are still in the corridors of the Nigerian power, for them, Ken Saro Wiwa was a threat to their tiny gods and comprado images. Ken was a rallying point for the common people that needed to move away from their misery, yet a friend and in some cases, acquaintance of prominent persons that love the trend that kept their people at the base. For the elites, the only way they could stop Ken was to make sure that his activities and MOSOP came to an end. One of such elites openly complained about the social democracy ideals and pursuits of Ken against the aristocracy that has rancorously and cancerously eaten deep into the fabrics of Ogoniland before the advent of MOSOP. He said that he does not find a place for the notion that all Ogoni people would live above poverty level if they succeeded in their fight against the Oil Company and Nigeria.

The Ogoni people did not find a connection between the activities of the oil companies and their farming activities before the advent of Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). When Ken Saro Wiwa formed MOSOP, the average Ogoni person went through another form of schooling by awareness and inculcation to realize that the activities of the oil companies has a direct adverse effect on the environment. The Ogoni people were taught to know and believe that the main reason behind the continual decline in the fecundity of the Ogoni environment is the drilling activities of Shell Petroleum Development Company. The Ogoni people immediately did a retrospect and find out that before now, it use to be a taboo for the Ogoni people to trade certain agricultural items because of the abundance of almost all kinds of agricultural produce. They realized that the Ogoni people who use to live in a totally natural "green" life style, has lost that natural flavor and that that natural green life is being replaced with a chemicalized and polluted life through the flaring of gas. They also discovered that the living conditions where no one, no matter how poor, would not, eat an overnight vegetable or soup is gone, because the abundance of vegetables that use to be found at everyone's backyard is gone with the coming of Shell into the land.

They also realized that the decline in food production that they attributed to the "act of God" as in famine was actually man inflicted and an encroachment on their land and alter disregard, and above all, an undermining of their cultural braveness to defend their farmlands. To the Ogoni people, a war for which they have been ignorant has been insidiously waged against them for 33 solid years without their knowledge, and most painful for the Ogoni people is that they have been taken as fools as the common Ogoni pior pior.

To the Ogoni people, failing to redeem the land from the control of the multinational and the government is tantamount to a self-betrayal and denial of their birthright. This inculcation is the underlying power behind the Ogoni people in chanting "No to Shell" whenever they gather in rallies. This is the same reason why the Ogoni people cannot let Shell to come back into their land, not without an agreement that is driven by the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR) at least. An agreement dictated by the collectivity of the common farmers and fishermen and women, the palm wine taper, the peasants and the local people who cannot divorce their living from the environment. Hence, the battle of the Ogoni people is battle of globalized rich versus rural and incapacitated poor that wants to maintain their agrarian life and rights

Born in 1941, Ken Saro Wiwa is from Gbor Village in Bane Town in Keh Khana kingdom. Though he was born in the traditional headquarter of the Ogoni people, which is Bori, where his parents were staying at the time as traders. Ken Saro Wiwa had his primary school education at Khana County Council school 1 in Bori, from where he went to Government College Umuahia for his high school education. He also studied English language at the University of Ibadan and graduated with Bachelor Degree. After his education, he became graduate assistant at the University of Nigeria Nsuka where he was until the Nigerian civil war broke out in 1966. He played very serious political roles from then, even though he was only twenty-five years old in 1966, he was able to influence the Ogoni people to join the federal side because of the ambiguity of the secession program of the Biafran side. This has however remain a strong point against him by the Igbo speaking people of Nigeria who over estimate the role of Ken Saro Wiwa in bringing the war to an end. Forgetting that Ken Saro Wiwa only surrendered Ogoniland to the federal side due to the fact that the war was concentrating its base within Ogoniland and other Niger Delta communities because of the oil.

Ken Saro Wiwa was appointed as the first administrator of Rivers Province that later became Rivers state, he served in several commissionership capacities in the young Rivers State, such as education, transport and housing, and information. By his own testimony, the government of Commander Diete Spiff sacked him in 1976 because of his vocal approach to issues. When he left government he tried politics by contesting for a seat in 1977 into the constituent assembly but was practically barred. He then decided to set up his own trading company, he is remembered after that election for saying "l am stepping back to jump better." He settled his family in London at the same period that he started his own business. He started by buying and selling until the business grew into a respectable supermarket. By 1985 he started full time writing when he has made enough money, he wrote features and articles for Nigerian dailies and later created a very humorous Nigeria series "Basi and Company".

Ken Saro Wiwa developed the finance to fight the cause of his people but more than that, he utilized the power of his pen as a writer. He sourced money to enable him to publish what he wanted about his people. Whereas his actual power lies in the fact that when he wrote, he wore the hat of an Ogoni Town Crier and through his modern spectacles, he saw the backwardness of his people even from his posh and palatable abode in London. He wrote like a modern man should but applied the vigor of rural born Ogoniman that wants to pass the message that he has been assigned to deliver to his own people as a life saver and to the world like an emissary.

To achieve that, he was also strategic. As an essayist, he wrote first about the social problems of Nigeria, press hard the need for social reforms. The government of General Ibrahim Babangida responded by creating the Mass Mobilization for Social Justice and Economic Recovery (MAMSER), a government organ that was declared to serve for social awareness and reformations. Ken Saro Wiwa was asked to head it as the first national director but he left MAMSER after eight months on discovery that MAMSER was created as a government megaphone instead of serving for the mobilization of the people. He went back to critical writing, using his Basi and Company comedy to lampoon the government of Nigeria for encouraging laziness and kleptocracy.

"Basi" is an Ogoni word that implies the labour of ones' hand. The comedy, Basi and Company ran for about three years and extolling the need for people to work hard and defray from wishful thinking of making wealth from the blues through some kind of "government connection" or "man know man" as it is tagged in Nigeria. The comedy has two key characters amongst others that are by no means less interesting, "Basi" the lead character and a "Madam", the landlady of Basi. Basi was always in debt to Madam from arrears of house rent for several months. He would never pay but always have some sort of stories that kept his landlady busy and under the impression that Basi would make money one day. Basi was like a super computer brain or a street genus of a sort that knows how to make everyone around him to assume unrealistically that he has the solutions to their problems even when he can not solve his own basic problem of paying his rent. This assumption kept him going while his friends like Alali who was always hungry looked up to him for food. Josco a street man and petty thief scouted for information that he brings to Basi in the hope that Basi would through some super intelligence and manipulation be able to make some thing good out of the information. Whenever there was such utopian dreams they would move to Dandy's bar, where they drank away the money in advance. Dandy in most cases gave away his brandy because he wants to have a "share of the deal." The whole characters in the comedy are victims but the most pathetic victim is Madam, who is probably a rich widow that was being tricked to believe that her rent would be paid one day. Worse of it, she was put under the illusion that Basi popularly called Mr. B, has better plans to involve her in some great businesses that would make her to build more and more houses even better than the only one that she has at the moment. Mr. B or Basi in many cases praised Madam by merely hailing her as "Madam the Madam". And the poor woman who is always dressed in the typical attire of the oil producing communities would forget her rent as she bask in empty flattery and praises that robs her of her due. Yet, she is apt to respond to the praise by shouting, "it is a matter of cash."

Madam in Basi and company is no other than the Ogoni people whose land was acquired without any standard agreement, the land is maintained by trick and the illusion is lubricated now and then through empty promises. Basi the conman represents the mentality of the social fabrics of the Nigerian nation, the system build false and empty hopes in the people around the resources of the indigenous peoples but when the hopes are not translated into reality the citizens uses their God given talents for crimes.

Ken Saro Wiwa is a man that earns the respect and acceptance of his people greatly, because, he had an up bringing that would have made him an aristocrat by all standards. Yet, he by choice decided to be a reformer and a socialist by fighting for equality and demonstrating practical zeal to enable him carry his people along. Ken for instance, built a house in his hometown very late when measured against his social status. He also refused to have an electric generator to supply electricity to his household because it would amount to "oppression" if others can not afford to get one like him. It is also said that his late mother once told him to refrain a little from his MOSOP campaign so that he would not be killed. But Ken responded by asking the mother to tell him "how many Ogoni women of your age could afford a cup of beverage in the morning." For Teeh, as the Ogoni people commonly call him, he wished that there should be as many persons like him, he wished that the average household in Ogoniland should be able to taste the kind of life that he and his relatives has tasted. The household of the Wiwas and members of the Gbenedorbi extended family are widely respected for their academic achievements and societal success that gives them great influence in Bane and Ogoniland as a whole but that was not enough for him. Until every household can afford for themselves without being a burden to one another, Ogoni was too backward for Kenule's liking

Until 1990 when he started MOSOP, many Ogoni people has forgotten about Ken Saro Wiwa, a woman from Zaakpon town, says, she use to think that Ken Saro Wiwa might have died in the Nigerian civil war of 1966. She recounted how Ken saved the Ogoni people during the war in one of the refugee camps. Another man from Luawii, who collaborated the story told of how they were being mal-treated and abandoned in the camp. "But when the news got to Ken Saro Wiwa, who was an administrator in Bonny, he came with trucks and carried us home and that is how we were saved." Recounts Elder Nwideezua who is now in his sixties; for Nwideezua, he is still tempted to think that Ken Saro Wiwa is just being held in some secret place by the government. He refuses to believe that Ken has been killed and has never attended any burial ceremonies or program in honor of Ken Saro Wiwa.

Ken believed that for the Ogoni people to try to meet up with other Nigerian tribes, his people must go to school. The first thing that Ken asked any young Ogoni person that he meet anywhere is what are you studying. Though he knew that many of the Ogoni youths could not afford the "luxury" of tertiary education in Nigeria, yet, he asked his normal question in a challenging way to put in your mentality in a tight corner that without higher education the Ogoni people are no where. Those that never understood his orientation and principle avoided him because they assumed wrongly that he love embarrassing them by confronting them with the need for "something" that they have given up hope on because of poverty. Ken believed that as an Ogoni man, one should do anything to obtain university education and he maintained his love for education and the campus by attending convocations and matriculations with the hope of knowing how many of his own people are among them. As a commissioner of education, he made sure that the government introduces scholarship to deserving students using that as a chance to grant scholarship to as many Ogoni people as possible who hadn't the means to further their education.

Alhaji, Sir, Awelebe Uhor, an energy journalist that worked with the Nigerian Tide and Sunray Newspaper, once asked Ken in a private and off the record interview why he used the government office to make sure his people went to school. He told him that he has to do what he did because, "l saw that my people were down the mud and even with all that I did, they are still no where." Sir Uhor says he would always regret not having Ken recorded on that fateful day because, "Ken was a man whose speeches has a magical way of staying with you for life." It is not only Sir Uhor that shares this notion of him. Mr. Levinus Nwikana, one time administrative manager of the government owned Pabod Breweries Limited, attributes his success and achievements in life to a piece of advice that he was given by Ken on his return from oversees for studies. While those that where at the reception in honor of Mr. Babep as the local government chairman of Khana Local Government is always apt to remember Ken. He is reported to have said the worse thing that would happen to Babep is for him to descend from the position of local government chairman and go back home to fight for his village Chieftaincy stool. "History has vindicated Ken at last" according to one Uegwere-Bo-ue youth that wish to be anonymous.

Reading Ken Saro Wiwa column in the Daily Times, a government owned paper that later axed the column because of Ken's vocal and precise attacks on ill government policies, one is able to deduce why he formed Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Ken Saro Wiwa having spent over three active decades within and around the corridor of governance realized that the Nigerian system does not care about the needs of the ordinary people. He came to the conclusion that the Nigerian federation was being used as a cover for bigger tribal interests. About when he wants to form MOSOP, he started using his column in the Daily Times to remind the Nigerian nation that there is a tribe called Ogoni in the Niger Delta producing a good percentage of the oil that the country is using. Until Ken did this, more than 95 percent of Nigeria has never heard of Ogoni people before, yet, the Ogoni people are active contributors to the wealth and resources of Nigeria on daily basis for about 33 years.

It is against this backdrop that he formed (MOSOP), as a socio-cultural organization for the advocacy of the cultural, environmental, social and economic rights of the Ogoni people. MOSOP was built on mass awareness and erectism for it to achieve its aims and objectives. Ken set about recruiting people from all segments of the Ogoniland, Professionals, Chiefs, Traders, Church people and Students, etc. After creating the awareness in the people of Ogoniland, an all involving Ogoni Bill of Rights was written and circulated round Ogoni for contributions and comments. When the Bill has received general acceptance by over 300,000 out of the 500,000 Ogoni people, it was then submitted to the Nigerian government on the 26th of August 1990. Two years after the Bill outlining what the Ogoni people wanted was submitted without any response by the government, the Ogoni people had a successful march in Ogoniland that climaxed with the declaration of Shell as Persona-non-grata that brought to an end the operations and oppressions of Shell in Ogoniland.