By Semafor Africa
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
Nigerian environmental activists rejected the government’s posthumous pardon of nine of their colleagues who were hanged by a military regime 30 years ago for protesting against Shell’s pollution in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu pardoned the “Ogoni Nine” — as the activists from the Ogoni community in Rivers state were known — last week including the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who had criticized then-junta leader Gen. Sani Abacha for not enforcing regulations on oil companies.
“To say ‘pardon’, I think it is insulting,” a leader of a youth group in Ogoni told Reuters, while Amnesty International said the executed activists should be recognized as being “innocent of any crime” and exonerated.
The Ogoni Nine’s campaigns against oil majors live on. An ongoing trial of Renaissance, a company that took over a Shell subsidiary in Nigeria, over the alleged failure to clean up 600,000 barrels of oil spilled in the Niger Delta in 2008 will conclude this week at London’s High Court.
