President Bola Tinubu’s decision to grant a posthumous pardon to the “Ogoni Nine” has been dismissed by activists from Nigeria’s Ogoni community, who say nothing short of full exoneration will right a decades-old wrong.
The amnesty, announced as part of Democracy Day commemorations on 12 June, covers writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight colleagues hanged in 1995 after a military tribunal convicted them of orchestrating protests against oil-giant Shell in the polluted Niger Delta. Their execution under General Sani Abacha sparked global outrage and remains one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s modern history.
“You cannot pardon people who never committed a crime,”
Celestine Akpobari, coordinator of the Ogoni Solidarity Forum, told Reuters. “If anyone needs forgiveness, it is the Nigerian state for what it did to the Ogoni.”
Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga rejected that view, saying Tinubu had taken an appropriate first step: “They’re free to press for exoneration; the president will consider any such plea.”
Shell, which ceased on-shore production in Ogoniland in the early 1990s and later divested its assets, maintains it bears no responsibility for the tribunal’s outcome.
Critics see the pardon as window-dressing while oil-industry damage lingers. Alagao Morris of the Environmental Defenders Network called it an attempt “to placate Ogoni sentiment while pollution is still largely unremedied.” Before any talk of reviving oil operations, he argued, “the names of Saro-Wiwa and the others must be cleared completely.”
Oil provides more than 90 percent of Nigeria’s export revenue and roughly two-thirds of government income—leaving the nation acutely vulnerable to swings in global crude prices, even as environmental grievances in the Delta remain unresolved.