The story of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian who fought to save his people from environmental destruction at the hands of Shell Oil, ought to give us a crisis of conscience about what the fuel in our gas tanks is and isn't worth.
It also provides a clue as to why militant groups of varying character, from activists to hooligans, have been making operations in the Niger delta difficult for Shell again lately.
Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian businessman and writer who in the early 1990s spearheaded a movement to get the environmental damage done by Shell Oil to the Niger delta—the home of his people, the Ogonis—cleaned up. He led the Ogonis in demanding that air, water and soil pollution that was sickening them and destroying local agriculture be addressed, and that the Ogonis be given a fair percentage of the oil revenue.
The Ogoni demonstrations annoyed the Nigerian government. In 1992 Saro-Wiwa was imprisoned for months without trial. In 1993, 10,000 Ogonis gathered to protest when an American firm, Willbros, tried to build a pipeline under contract to Shell. Nigerian soldiers fired at them, wounding 10. The Nigerian regional security forces were under pressure to deal with the Ogoni problem; an internal memo written in 1994 noted, "Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken…."
In 1994 the Nigerian government trumped up charges against Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni organizers and arrested them. The nine were forced into court to face the testimony of witnesses bribed by the government. In 1995 Saro-Wiwa, author, environmentalist and producer of a popular satirical TV serial, was hung.
Ten years later, according to visitors, the Ogoni homeland was still, in the words of British writer William Boyd, "an ecological wasteland reeking of sulphur, its creek and holes poisoned by indiscriminate oil spillage and ghoulishly lit (at) night by the orange flames of gas flares." Besides the cost at the pump, oil has another cost—one Americans are seldom informed about until, or until after, there is a human crisis.
