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Authors: Howard W. French
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producing the least evidence, in June 1995, Abacha arrested Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military leader and the only Nigerian general who had ever surrendered power to an elected government (in 1979). Obasanjo was charged with treason, for supposedly plotting to overthrow the Abacha government, and was tried in secret that year and sentenced to death. 1
Almost simultaneously, Abacha’s agents jailed Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, Obasanjo’s former vice president, and a leading delegate to the constitutional conference created by Abacha. Yar’Adua’s principal offense was introducing a motion at the conference demanding a quick return to democratic rule. He, too, was charged with treason and sentenced to death. Yar’Adua was murdered in jail not long afterward through lethal injection—some said it was battery acid—by Abacha’s security agents.
Most shocking of all, though, was the arrest and execution of Kenule Beeson “Ken” Saro-Wiwa, a playwright and environmental activist who had given prominence to his Ogoni ethnic group’s demands for a cleaner environment and a share of the wealth from their region’s rich oil production. His arrest had shone the harshest spotlight on Nigeria.
Abacha was not known for his taste in literature, but his handling of Saro-Wiwa played itself out like an ode to Kafka. A peaceable, pipe-smoking man who had made his reputation in the country as a writer of biting satirical fiction and of popular television comedies, Saro-Wiwa had gradually become an impassioned, and increasingly bold, activist on behalf of the 500,000 or so Ogoni people. Abacha and Saro-Wiwa had known each other for years, meeting in the aftermath of the Biafran War, in the 1970s, when they were friendly neighbors in Port Harcourt. Their children had even once played together in the same government flats. But amid the savage repression that followed Abacha’s seizure of power in November 1993, Saro-Wiwa became an ineluctable target.
From the very start of the regime’s crackdown on dissent, it is clear that the diminutive writer and his Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, or MOSOP, were not considered to be just any rabble-rousing opposition group. Unlike Abacha’s hijacking of the country’s democracy, MOSOP’s campaign against the destruction of Ogoni fishing beds and Niger delta wetlands by international oil companies, in particular Shell, had won international attention, particularly among environmental and human rights groups, like Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Moreover, attacks against oil pipelines and demonstrations against oil workers had forced Shell to shut down its operations in the Ogoni areas, interfering with the stream of petroleum revenues that fed the dictatorship. “Some opposition groups were still able to get away with a lot of things, criticizing Abacha just about as harshly as they wanted,” the United States ambassador to Nigeria, Walter Carrington, told me. “But MOSOP was hitting the Abacha people in the wallet, and that is the one place where they just don’t fool around.”
The biggest threat went well beyond the question of a few tens of thousands of barrels of oil, though. In his impassioned, literary way, Saro-Wiwa had begun to successfully articulate a challenge to the revenue-sharing formulas that kept the vast bulk of oil revenues in the hands of whoever was in charge of the central government. Under the traditional arrangements, the main oil-producing areas of the southeast—areas where powerless minorities like the Ogoni were legion—had remained as poor and despoiled as ever. Groups like MOSOP did not stop at questioning the military dictatorship’s right to salt away billions of dollars worth of oil receipts in Citibank accounts, in Switzerland and elsewhere. They were attacking the very rationale behind the resource-poor north’s determination to cling to power: wealth redistribution, at gunpoint if necessary.
In 1994, Lieutenant Colonel Paul
Almost simultaneously, Abacha’s agents jailed Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, Obasanjo’s former vice president, and a leading delegate to the constitutional conference created by Abacha. Yar’Adua’s principal offense was introducing a motion at the conference demanding a quick return to democratic rule. He, too, was charged with treason and sentenced to death. Yar’Adua was murdered in jail not long afterward through lethal injection—some said it was battery acid—by Abacha’s security agents.
Most shocking of all, though, was the arrest and execution of Kenule Beeson “Ken” Saro-Wiwa, a playwright and environmental activist who had given prominence to his Ogoni ethnic group’s demands for a cleaner environment and a share of the wealth from their region’s rich oil production. His arrest had shone the harshest spotlight on Nigeria.
Abacha was not known for his taste in literature, but his handling of Saro-Wiwa played itself out like an ode to Kafka. A peaceable, pipe-smoking man who had made his reputation in the country as a writer of biting satirical fiction and of popular television comedies, Saro-Wiwa had gradually become an impassioned, and increasingly bold, activist on behalf of the 500,000 or so Ogoni people. Abacha and Saro-Wiwa had known each other for years, meeting in the aftermath of the Biafran War, in the 1970s, when they were friendly neighbors in Port Harcourt. Their children had even once played together in the same government flats. But amid the savage repression that followed Abacha’s seizure of power in November 1993, Saro-Wiwa became an ineluctable target.
From the very start of the regime’s crackdown on dissent, it is clear that the diminutive writer and his Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, or MOSOP, were not considered to be just any rabble-rousing opposition group. Unlike Abacha’s hijacking of the country’s democracy, MOSOP’s campaign against the destruction of Ogoni fishing beds and Niger delta wetlands by international oil companies, in particular Shell, had won international attention, particularly among environmental and human rights groups, like Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Moreover, attacks against oil pipelines and demonstrations against oil workers had forced Shell to shut down its operations in the Ogoni areas, interfering with the stream of petroleum revenues that fed the dictatorship. “Some opposition groups were still able to get away with a lot of things, criticizing Abacha just about as harshly as they wanted,” the United States ambassador to Nigeria, Walter Carrington, told me. “But MOSOP was hitting the Abacha people in the wallet, and that is the one place where they just don’t fool around.”
The biggest threat went well beyond the question of a few tens of thousands of barrels of oil, though. In his impassioned, literary way, Saro-Wiwa had begun to successfully articulate a challenge to the revenue-sharing formulas that kept the vast bulk of oil revenues in the hands of whoever was in charge of the central government. Under the traditional arrangements, the main oil-producing areas of the southeast—areas where powerless minorities like the Ogoni were legion—had remained as poor and despoiled as ever. Groups like MOSOP did not stop at questioning the military dictatorship’s right to salt away billions of dollars worth of oil receipts in Citibank accounts, in Switzerland and elsewhere. They were attacking the very rationale behind the resource-poor north’s determination to cling to power: wealth redistribution, at gunpoint if necessary.
In 1994, Lieutenant Colonel Paul
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