This column believes that President Muhammadu Buhari is in a dilemma over how to deal with the spate of dissents, underpinning the security crisis facing the country as he winds down his eight years’ reign. As a leader, what is likely to be uppermost in his mind now is how history will remember him few years from now, when he will no longer be in power and all the sycophants and the aides desperate to keep their jobs have disappeared from the national radar.
That feeling was reinforced after listening to the president addressing the Ogoni traditional leaders who paid him a visit last week. In his address, the president said that the federal government would consider a pardon for Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other eight Ogoni activists who were extra-judicially killed by the government of Sani Abacha. We recall that in the 1990s, Ogoniland became the hot-bed of activism against the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta with Ken Saro-Wiwa leading the charge, under the rubric of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP).
While the people of the region laid a charge of environmental degradation and criminal appropriation of the resources of the Niger Delta against the Nigerian state and the International Oil Companies led by Shell Petroleum Development Company, the government of Nigeria accused the activists of undermining the economic well-being of the nation by threatening her national economic assets. Of course, for the Ogoni people, the so-called national economic assets were sign-posts of repression and subjugation by a behemoth structured to supress their rights.
Feeling alienated and primed for annihilation, the crisis within Ogoni turned an internal struggle between the moderates who preferred rapprochement with the federal government and the activists who pushed that the Ogoni should take their destiny into their own hands and fight their cause. In the ensuing melee, four prominent Ogoni leaders who were considered as saboteurs of the Ogoni struggle, where murdered by suspected activists of the struggle.
With the Ogoni Bill of Rights (1990) in place, under the guidance of the intellectually savvy Ken Saro-Wiwa and his compatriots, and with the possibility that other parts of Niger-Delta may follow suit and potentially demand for their independence from the oppressive federal-unitary system of government in Nigeria, the government of Sani Abacha decided to peremptorily end the struggle by snuffing life out of the leaders, relying on a bizarre criminal jurisprudence. With Saro-Wiwa and company hanged on November 10, 1995, and internal schism implanted amongst the Ogonis, the struggle petered out.
Expectedly, the peace of the graveyard returned to the Niger Delta, but resurrected ferociously during the regime of President Umaru Yar’Adua. Perhaps with the hindsight of history, President Yar’Adua choose rapprochement with the Niger Delta militants, who have acquired some level of deterrent against the federal government, by acquiring lethal weapons able to threaten the much beloved critical national oil assets. Again, with the benefits of democracy at play, it would have been extremely difficult for Yar’Adua to apply similar strong-arm tactics like Abacha, without the international human rights community screaming.
So, even though the Yar’Adua regime did not tinker with the repressive federal-unitary system of government he inherited, he somehow ended up a hero for some Niger Delta people for instituting the Presidential Amnesty Programme. And with the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) also in place, the two programmes provided some opportunities for the jobless militant youths of the region and created a pool of resources to develop the much neglected region, and bribe their troublesome elites, when necessary.
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But now with few days to the 26th anniversary of the hanging of Saro-Wiwa and his compatriots at the Port-Harcourt prison, the Ogoni traditional rulers have returned to the oppressive federal government, whose actions and inactions prompted the crisis to ask for clemency for their sons.
For the Ijaw National Congress (INC), the request for clemency is unnecessary, instead the federal government should apologise to the Ogonis for killing their sons “as a result of their peaceful campaigns against economic exploration, environmental despoliation and gross abuse of the people’s fundamental human and resource rights.” Prof Benjamin Okaba, the INC president argued further: “we wonder what crime Ken Saro-Wiwa and others committed that warrants state pardon. Secondly, even if he was allowed the defence, was he given the right of appeal?”
Of note, the killing of Saro-Wiwa elicited sanctions against Nigeria by the United Nations and leading democracies.
This writer agrees that since the federal government did not allow the Saro-Wiwa and company their right of appeal, after their conviction by the special military tribunal created by Abacha, their killing was unlawful in the eyes of the law. In Bello & Ors vs Attorney-General of Oyo State (1986) 5 NWLR (Pt. 45) 828, the Supreme Court found in favour of the appellants and awarded damages against the government of Oyo State for executing a convict, while his appeal was pending.
In that case, Aniagolu JSC held: “I… hold, that the most reasonable construction that can possibly be placed on those section (section 220(1), section 213(1) of the 1979 constitution must be that it must be implied, and that implication read into the constitution, that an appellant who has validly appealed against a death sentence imposed on him, must have the sentence stayed while he is proceeding with the appeal. The substance of a valid appeal in such a case is, by itself, a stay of execution.”
No doubt, before the execution of a judgment, the period provided by law for a right of appeal is allowed to extinguish, so to do otherwise amounts to executive lawlessness as held in the case of Bello & Ors vs Attorney-General of Oyo State supra. But also very importantly, President Muhammadu Buhari, if he is interested in securing enduring peace in Ogoni land, must ask himself if the Nigerian state has been fair to the people of the Ogoni and indeed the Niger Delta in the appropriation of their resources and the environmental despoliation of their land.
Of course, the resounding answer is a capital NO. For this column, at the root of the many agitations that has continued to beset the nation is the lack of will to deal fairly with most parts of the country, especially the oil bearing sections of the country. In the determination to fasten its grip on the oil resources, the Nigerian state has tendentiously abandoned the federal system of government which our forbearers negotiated for, at independence.
If President Buhari has the political will, this column recommends a return to a federal system of government, against the present suffocating federal-unitary practice, as the best rapprochement to birth a peaceful Nigeria.