Ogoni films put Shell in the dock

Case for the prosecution set out in documentaries about the executions that followed 1990s protests in Nigeria against the oil giant

TWO haunting films emerging out of the battle against the Anglo-Dutch multinational Shell are grabbing attention 27 years after the hanging of nine men exposed the injustice created by the oil industry in Ogoniland, southeast Nigeria.

The most well-known of those executed was Ken Saro-Wiwa, a popular Nigerian author and broadcaster who led a protest movement against the contamination of fisheries and farmlands by oil spills and gas flaring in Ogoniland, a kingdom in the Niger Delta where Shell had been extracting oil since the 1950s. Written and directed by Majiye Uchibeke, I Am More Dangerous Dead focuses on Saro-Wiwa’s efforts to expose the environmental crisis that left the Ogoni people impoverished and sick while enriching the Nigerian government.

The 25-minute film shows archive footage of Saro-Wiwa leading 300,000 strong peaceful protests against Shell in 1993, which eventually forced the company to shut down its Ogoniland operations. In 1995, he and eight other activists were rounded up and convicted of the killing of four local chiefs following a trial that the then UK premier John Major denounced as “fraudulent … followed by judicial murder”.

Chilling and poignant in equal measure, the film recently won second prize Best Short Film Award at the International Nature Film Festival in Gödöllő, Hungary, and the Bronze Tilapia Award for Social Impact at the Tiete International Film Awards in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Last month it was screened at the prestigious Student World International Film Festival in California after being selected from 13,000 submissions.

Assistant producer Winifred A Adebayo said: “This is a very important film that allows Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni eight to take their rightful place as the first climate justice activists of modern times. They paid the ultimate price with their lives in a case that made a mockery of justice and continues to cast a long shadow over the actions of Nigeria’s then military government and Royal Dutch Shell, which still seeks to evade any responsibility for the eco-side the mining operations have had on the Niger Delta and its people.”

Outside of Nigeria, the names of the other executed men remain largely unknown. The feature-length Esther and the Law is a corrective to this, highlighting the case of Barinem Kiobel, a local state government commissioner who played no part in the protests but was nevertheless arrested. As his wife, Esther, doggedly seeks justice for him from her home in Dallas Texas, where she settled after fleeing Nigeria, there are intermittent clips of her sitting forlornly in the dock alongside Saro-Wiwa.

Her more than two decades fight took her and three women whose husbands had also been hanged – Victoria Bera, Blessing Eawo and Charity Levula – to a court in the Netherlands. During the hearing, three men testified that Shell and the Nigerian government had given them money and offered them other bribes in order to incriminate her husband and the other accused. This supports the claims of Amnesty International – the film’s main sponsor – that Shell’s requests for help in handling the Ogoniland protests led to a brutal government crackdown, culminating in the arrests and executions. However, in 2020 the court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Shell had been involved.

Directed by Tatjana Scheltema, the film’s premier in London in July was followed by a panel discussion where Esther Kiobel told the audience: “What keeps me going is that my husband is innocent and that deadly diseases are still going on in Ogoniland. The pollution is everywhere, there is oil in the rivers and people can’t go to farm.”

Although Shell remains locked out of Ogoniland, its ageing pipelines still crisscross the area. “Nothing has changed in 27 years,” said Lazarus Tamana, who has taken over Saro-Wiwa’s mantle as leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. “There continue to be oil spills and if Shell were a responsible corporate citizen they would be checking their pipes and repairing them.”

He added: “We are not here for just today, we are here tomorrow and for the future and we will exhaust all avenues available to us to secure justice. The next step will be the International Criminal Court.”

In 2009 Shell agreed to an out of court settlement of $15.5 million to five of the Ogoni Nine families, including Saro-Wiwa’s. The conglomerate has also faced a series of ongoing court claims for reparations over polluted farmland and fisheries, although only seven communities have won compensation, with 34 remaining.

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