A press statement delivered on this day, 15th September 2025, at the Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) headquarters in Lagos, by the Rev. Dr. Nnimmo Bassey, Director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) and Chairman, Ken Saro Wiwa’s 30th Anniversary Planning Committee.
Today, we gather against injustice. To remember our immediate history, one that still cuts us deeply. On November 10, 1995, Nigeria and the world witnessed an execution, a deliberate, cold, and calculated act of state violence designed to silence truth and crush dissent.
That day, the Nigerian Government, in partnership with corporate oil interests, hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight fellow Ogoni leaders—Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, and John Kpuine. They were murdered not because they disobeyed any known laws, but because they exposed oppression and questioned a mindless establishment. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a defender of human rights and of “nature’s resources,” a commitment the State not only found strange and intolerable but also chose to punish with death.
His ideology, ERECTISM, captured his vision that included ethic autonomy, ethnic ownership and control of resources and ethnic control and management of the environment. It called for sustainable development and national unity.
He believed that nature’s resources were not to be destroyed but managed to foster a human environment connection and, by extension, sustain life and cultural identity. Without mincing words, he reminded us that reckless extractivism, as was the case in Ogoni Land, was poisonous and that oppressed voices must never be silenced. He called for change in a system where multinational oil corporations smile to the bank while richly endowed communities are starved with crude oil-poisoned waters, land, and environment.
His life and legacy remind us of the enduring significance of justice and the certainty that any economy built without fairness and human dignity is an unsustainable economy. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a selfless leader, and his struggles were more about his people than about himself. He leveraged the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) to shape a regional agitation against unmitigated exploitation, abandonment and political erasure. He placed the Ogoni ecological genocide firmly at the centre of national debate and global attention.
Ken Saro-Wiwa would later pay the ultimate price for confronting Shell. His peaceful resistance was criminalised, and he was detained on false and manufactured charges. He was dragged before a sham tribunal where truth was buried and injustice reigned.
Yet, while he was stripped of his life, his death birthed renewed struggle, consciousness, and inspiration for a liveable environment. Indeed, his courage has ignited movements globally and across generations. He was a brave man and declared quite presciently that even if he were killed his ideas won’t die. As he declared whilst facing the hangman’s noose, “The environment is man’s first right. Without a safe environment, man cannot exist to claim other rights.”
Although the injustice he denounced continues today, the people have risen and refuse to be silenced. Ogoniland remains polluted, covered by toxic spills, making fishing, farming and diverse land uses difficult. Rivers remain contaminated. Gas still burns toxic smoke directly into the lungs of children and elders. Life expectancy continues to drop. Communities are still crying out in hunger, robbed of their livelihoods, still living in poverty, while oil corporations and their collaborators continue to bathe in profit, enriching themselves with the very resources that keep the people below the poverty line. The same machinery of oppression, silence, and government indifference continues.
Even now, government and corporate actors deepen this injustice through ongoing divestment plans in Nigeria, which ignores governance tenets of free prior informed consent of the people, and amount to a mockery of genuine reparations. Companies responsible for decades of pollution now attempt to walk away, shifting liabilities while communities remain in ruins. Equally troubling is the recent so-called presidential pardon of the Ogoni Nine by President Tinubu, a hollow gesture crafted for political points, which manipulates history and justice instead of addressing the truth of their judicial murder. Added to this is the confiscation of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Memorial Bus, despite a clear ruling of the Federal High Court against it. Its continued seizure is not only illegal but also a painful reminder of how state institutions weaponise power to suppress memory and diminish the social and political legacy of the people.
Furthermore, even as remediation efforts remain slow, flawed, and incomplete, we note renewed attempts to reopen oil wells in Ogoniland against the will of the people. Such moves, rather than healing wounds, risk reopening them—signalling that lessons from Ken’s struggle have yet to be learned.
It is therefore important that we remind ourselves of these struggles and demand with urgency and without compromise that the agitations of Ken Saro-Wiwa be heard very clearly and turned into concrete action.
We, the underlisted Non-Governmental Organisations, on behalf of the affected frontline communities and other interested parties in the Ogoni struggles, hereby demand the following:
- Thorough and transparent clean-up of Ogoniland and the entire Niger Delta — not in cosmetic reports that will later gather dust, nor in committees that apportion blame and politicise recommendations, but in real, visible action that restores land, rivers, and livelihoods. We demand that every drop of spilled oil must be accounted for, every community must be healed, and every life must be restored. This clean-up must be scientific, transparent, and independently monitored, with local communities fully involved in planning and execution. Polluted water sources must be detoxified, mangroves regenerated, and farmlands returned to productivity. Anything less is an insult to the memory of those who died demanding justice and a continuation of the very injustice Ken Saro-Wiwa fought against.
- Accountability from multinational oil companies: That corporations whose current and historical activities contribute to environmental infractions and injustice pay commensurate reparations for the devastation they have caused, not as charity. These payments must reflect the true cost of decades of pollution, loss of livelihoods, destruction of ecosystems, and the generational poverty imposed on communities. No company should be allowed to divest or walk away from liabilities while people still drink poisoned water, breathe poisoned air and farm on toxic soil. True accountability means cleaning up their mess, restoring what was lost, and submitting to legal, financial, and moral responsibility for crimes against people and the environment. We therefore demand that every action taken on divestment be immediately reversed.
- Justice for communities: The State must prioritise the interests of the communities and keep them from being further exposed to harmful acts perpetrated by greedy corporations in their inordinate pursuit of profit. Justice means safeguarding the right of people to live in dignity, to breathe clean air, drink safe water, and farm on unpolluted soil. It means rejecting policies and contracts that sacrifice communities at
the altar of profit and ensuring that remediation, restoration and development reach the people directly, not filtered through corrupt bureaucracies. Above all, justice for communities requires that their voices guide decisions about their land and resources, so they are never again treated as expendable in the chase for oil wealth. - Decriminalisation of shared struggles: Never again must dissenting opinions and voices of truth be silenced or intimidated. We call for the protection and not incarceration of environmental and human rights agitators, acknowledging that their voices are not threats to the state nor democratic control of common resources. To criminalise activists is to criminalise justice itself, for they speak on behalf of vulnerable people and the environment that sustains us all. Their courage must be recognised as service to humanity, not treated as subversion. The State must guarantee freedom of expression, the right to peaceful assembly, and protection from harassment so that no citizen will ever again face the gallows, as Ken Saro-Wiwa did, for demanding fairness and accountability.
- Leave the Oil in the Ground: We demand the immediate demilitarization of the Niger Dekta and a halt of all attempts to resume oil operations in Ogoniland. We are not unaware of the quiet negotiations and ongoing talks aimed at reopening extractive activities in our communities. We reject these schemes in their entirety. The oil must remain in the ground. To extract it is to reopen old wounds, to deepen the scars of pollution and death that Shell and its collaborators left behind. Ogoni is not an oilfield, it is a homeland. The Niger Delta must not continue to be treated as a sacrifice zone. Any move to restart drilling or open new oil wells is a grievous assault on our people and our environment, and in the memories of our heroes past.
These are not mere demands. They are Ken Saro-Wiwa’s unfinished business. Thirty years after his judicial murder, his struggle is still alive.
Once again, I welcome you all.
Signed:
i. Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF)
ii. Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA)
iii. Environmental Rights Action (ERA)/Friends of the Earth (FoEN) Nigeria
iv. Kebetkache Women Development & Resource Centre
v. OilWatch International
vi. Social Action
vii. Miideekor Environmental Development Initiative
viii. We The People
ix. Lekeh Development Foundation
x. Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA Resource Centre)
