Before the hangman tightened the noose on November 10, 1995, the name Ken Saro-Wiwa was an exemplar of activism. A writer, television producer and environmentalist, the former ANA president and that of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and waters of Ogoniland by multinational petroleum industries, especially the Royal Dutch Shell company. He was tried by a special military tribunal for allegedly masterminding the gruesome murder of Ogoni chiefs at a pro-government meeting, leading to his hanging in 1995 by the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. Like his father, Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr. is a writer. Besides, he is a journalist and the Senior Special Assistant to the President on International Media and Civil Society. Recently, HENRY AKUBUIRO caught up with him at the refurbished Ken Saro- Wiwa Centre in Port Harcourt, after a reading session by Africa39 writers, where he spoke on efforts being made to ensure that his father’s legacy remains in public domain. Aside having a platform for showcasing his father’s works and documents, the foundation has a writers’ corner where writers partake in reading sessions. 19 years after your father’s death, do you think his legacy still resonates? Sometimes I have this anxiety that never leaves me that my father left all these tremendous name and goodwill, and when I look around, I see what his life was really –but are we seeing a proper honouring of his life and dead? And that thing is very painful for me, for I see in everything that question. The fact that this door handle [in the office]isn’t working, the question keeps coming back to my mind; the fact that we have a president from the Niger Delta and these issues are still there, the question comes up again. Every little thing brings up this issue in my head. I think I feel it, and other people feel it, too; but I feel it most because I carry the name of my father as the first son. So, when I look around, I am despondent in many ways, except that am very proud of myself. But there are many things that have been happening, if you actually put them in context, and if you ask other people. Yes, we have not created utopia in Ogoni which he wanted. However, many things have also happened, issues like the concentration of the analysis of impact of oil on the environment. It may not have occasioned fundamental changes, but people are asking much harder questions now, even though that we can’t do things with impunity. There are court cases, and foreign jurisdictions are receiving cases about environmental degradation in the Niger Delta and Niger Delta issues and resource control are central to the debates in Nigeria. Even the raising of the derivation principle from 1.5 per cent to 13 percent –all these things, you can say, are partly the result of Ken Saro-Wiwa. It depends on how you want to look at it –you look at it from my point of view as his son, very self- critical, we are nowhere there yet. I assume that the day we create utopia in Ogoni and all these things are reversed, we can then say yes, his death was not in vain. Until we reach that point, somebody like me is always going to say we are a long way down the end of our journey. While some will be more pragmatic to see where we have come, others will say we haven’t gone that far. But, to answer your question, it depends on who you are. Some changes have been made; some gains have been made and we have also suffered some losses. It took a while for you to set up the Ken Saro- Wiwa Foundation, what informed it? We just want to tell the stories of what happened here and what is happening here. The platforms that we use are different. This is a platform. We want to encourage writers to their stories of the environment around them. It is not necessarily based on the Ogoni. Ken Saro-Wiwa means different things to different communities beyond Ogoni and Africa, and we have environmental rights, minority rights, sustainable environment and human rights. So, we want to encourage all those things using this platform. There many individuals, institutions and organizations, who are agitating for similar things or similar path to what we are doing, but somebody like Saro- Wiwa deserves his own memorial. beyond Ogoni and Africa, and we have environmental Part of it is making sure that people know who Ken Saro-Wiwa was, making all the private papers acceptable, making all the photographs that we have acceptable, and making his official biography and encouraging people to make films to document. That’s the real source of the foundation: to know who this man was and also enable other people to interpret his legacy. I am not the only person who can interpret his legacy. He was a father to me –yes –but he was a father to everybody. Others were touched by his story. Sometimes people come to me and tell me, “Your father inspired me”. That touches me; that inspires me. How many people have others come up to them to tell them, “Your father inspired me”? In order for my father to keep inspiring people, we must document his life. Aside archiving his life, is the foundation interested in advocacy and rights pursuit? You have MOSOP and other political organizations that are pursuing advocacy. It is a tricky thing to compare MOSOP and the foundation. Ken Saro- Wiwa wasn’t MOSOP and MOSOP wasn’t Ken Saro-Wiwa: they are one but not the same. But we will work with MOSOP, federal government –if necessary –and everybody to achieve our goals. The advocacy part of it is something the community as a whole must decide. Ken Saro- Wiwa was one incredible Ogoni man, but the advocacy for rights of the people must be done by the people and the institutions that represent the Ogoni. You hinted on your father impacting on the lives of many people different ways, what aspect did he impact on you? If you were not his son, and you encountered him the way you did, how would you describe him? The thing is to always be generous, humorous, be provocative and be patient and hard working. Those are the things that I took away from him. You will find it when I am frustrated and angry, and I realize that my father agitated for these issues for over 30-40 years. Some people would tell me, “Your father died long ago, and nothing has happened,” bla bla bla. And you can then suck into that. As I said, I am always anxious about every little thing When I sit back, I say, no, there is a process; there is a roadmap I have in my head, and I know how long it can take to achieve these things. I opened this place (centre), ten years ago, but have rarely been in, because I got drawn into government. But it was always there in my mind that I had to come back to this. Being in government was one part of the journey I had to take. It means I have to acquire some kind of discipline and knowledge and come back and put it in process. In one of the last letters my father wrote me he told me, “Look, you must have a plan in life and. If you have a plan, keep working at it. Sometimes you may have to adjust and change because of circumstances, but what you must do is have a plan and keep working at it.” My exit strategy on Ken Saro-Wiwa is that I put together a platform and a process that will always remember him, whether I am alive or dead, to enable people to come and remember him and add to the stock of his legacy. As long as we put that process in place, I am ok, because that’s what this job is: to make sure he is never forgotten. For me, it is very difficult to engage in my father’s legacy, because there are many people who think I should have been doing this or that, and my father would never have done this. If I listen to all these people, I will go round in circle and never achieve anything. So, I have to have a plan, and that plan is very simple and focused: I set this up and let other people carry the legacy. Your dad was obviously a pan-Nigerian man, who fought for the unity of this country during and after the Nigeria civil war. Did he feel a sense of betrayal towards the end of his life as death starred him in the face in the hands of the same establishment he worked with? I think he always agitated for a fairer society where every minority was as important as any ethnic majority. So, because of what he experienced did not diminish his determination to create a fair and just Nigeria. And that is what I have taken from him: if we harness our potentials, we will soar higher. I always say that there are only about 13 countries with a population of more than 80 million, ad all those countries harnessed their potentials to be great countries, and not more so with Nigeria with our diversity –our diversity in human and natural resources. Imagine if we harness all of these together, then we will be one of the greatest countries in the world. From time to time, I doubt the Project Nigeria, and I have the right to doubt the Project Nigeria, because part of Nigeria killed my father for a crime he did not commit. But that doesn’t mean Nigeria is bad, because I know that millions of Nigerians were desperately upset and unhappy about that. Just because a few people did that to my father does not diminish him, and he would have known that. He might have been despondent in the last 18 months of his life that he had fought for the unity of Nigeria during the civil war; he had agitated for a fairer Nigeria; but it doesn’t deter from the fact that he was a patriot and a national hero. Nigeria is not a perfect country –there is no country that is perfect – it is a work in process. A nation only exist in the imagination. As long as it is peaceful, creative and hopeful, then we can create a country that we will be proud of. So, why is it that the Ogoni agitation hasn’t been as vociferous as it used to be in the past? It changed because there has been recognition at the centre that what we were agitating for is valid. But, whether the centre has yielded enough ground depends on your point of view. If you are radical, you will say no; you would want 57 derivation. It depends on your temperament. For me, I think Nigeria is a process of evolution; as much as I would like us to go from 1.5 to 50 percent, it may take some time. There is also pushback; when the agitation was so strong, we were led to violence, and the struggle suffered a lot of human casualties and materials, too. And people get tired as well – I have been around this issue for 25 years, and it got to a point I said enough, let me rest a while and dedicate some time to my family basically, emotionally and financially. You do all those things and then you come back to it again. The thing has moved, too. Other actors have come onstage: they have their own interpretations and contexts, and you have to acknowledge that –you can’t impose one man’s vision and life on the entire Niger Delta, and there is also pushback, as I noted earlier. The forces of reaction will push back: they will settle some people, they will bring some people in and they will silence some people. So, it is a process. I think it will take some time, but I am very certain that a hundred years from now, Ken Saro-Wiwa can be remembered more than most people in this country. What makes you optimism? Because we are making a dedicated effort to make sure that the history is remembered correctly. That’s why this centre is here. People who write the history are the ones who define what happened. That’s why it is important to have the archives in his memory; they will not silence the man and silence his memory. You can silence the man, but the memory must be absolutely maintained so that generations unborn will be able to access that memory and know what about what he stood for. He, too, was committed to documentation. He documented everything he did. The reason was that he wanted it to be on record “This is who I am and this is what I did”. For him, as a writer, he saw Ogoni as an invisible community, and the idea was to make invisible visible. We have so many invisible stories in this country that have not been properly told and have been part of the entire canon. Until everybody has been accommodated and all these stories are told, you can’t say truly we are a nation. The other day, we had a debate about that we have about 514 official languages in Nigeria, and some people are insisting that only three will be official languages –which means you are silencing the minorities. But you can’t silence everybody. To tell a true story on Nigeria, you have to tell more than 170 million stories. It is impractical, but let’s try and achieve that; let’s try to make our people more visible; let’s not silence our history. It’s part of a process. People want a kind of narrative art where there is a beginning, middle and end –all within the space of a lifetime. But it doesn’t always happen always like that. Sometimes the context of the situation shifts back and forth. But, hopefully, you will get to where you want to get. silence everybody. To tell a true story on Nigeria, you Your dad did not witness the advent of Boko Haram in Nigeria, how do you see Boko Haram’s agitation compared to Niger Delta struggle championed by your late dad? I don’t want to compare both. There are issues that created Boko Haram. For a reason or another, there are some people who feel alienated from the Project Nigeria. What it means is that we have to strengthen the concept of Nigeria. I think, for all, we have to look at what is happening in Borno, and we have to say no: this is not where we stand as a country; this does not reflect Islam as a religion. There are millions of people in the north who do not subscribe to a violent, nihilist agenda. However, what is creating this? We must tackle those issues. For me, the two are not the same thing. The situation was largely a non-violent thing, and it was on resource control and not against other Nigerians; we were not trying to take people’s lives. But, having said that, these people are Nigerians, and we must get them to subscribe to the idea of Nigeria –the idea of Nigeria must be stronger than any other. That means we have feel a strong Nigeria, and everybody has to be part of it. How do you think what you said is feasible? What can be done? It’s a process. We are in a world that is changing. We are emerging from an industrial society to a kind of post-industrial society, if you like. Here is a country like Nigeria where the population is doubling every 25 years, and you are churning out between 800,000 to 1 million graduates every year –what jobs do they have? There is a huge discrepancy in income and inequality being generated. How are people being born today? Born to subscribe to the idea of Nigeria if they don’t have water, jobs, light and decent education? We can talk as much as we want, but we have to ensure everybody feels they have a fair stake in this country. When we were privatizing power, it got to a point where we began to ask, how could a country of this size be generating 3-4-5,000 megawatts? But, having served in government, I know the challenges. Sometimes people think it is a failure of will, but it is not a failure of will. There are many people in the chain who like Nigeria just the way it is, and you have to overcome this agenda. I have been in government for 8 years, and I can see it. There are many people who are in government who want Nigeria to work, but not every Nigerian has that agenda. These are the difficulties we face. As an outsider, I was criticizing everything, but when you get into government, you will know that there are many people who are trying to make sure that things work. Have you reached out to other foundations in Ogoni? We are just starting. This reception is just to sensitize people. You can see it is a big building here, and we are using just a corner of the building [for now]. The project is ongoing. We have 3-4 year plan, which will eventually see this building occupied. As we build up, you will find the answers to some of these questions you are asking. This article first appeared in sunnewsonline
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 07:41:16 +0000