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Shell: Human Rights In Nigeria

Introduction

In 1995, a Nigerian military tribunal, in what most observers decried as a sham trial, ordered the execution of noted author and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. The Ogoni are a 500,000-member ethnic group of farmers and fishermen that live in Nige¬ria's coastal plain. For several years, the Ogoni had been waging a vigorous political campaign against Nigeria's military rulers and the giant oil company Royal Dutch/Shell. They had been seeking greater self-determination, rights to the revenue stemming from oil exploration on traditional Ogoni lands, and compensa¬tion for the environmental degradation to their land caused by frequent oil spills from fractured pipelines. Shell had been pumping oil from Ogoni lands since the late 1950s. In 1994, four Ogoni chiefs who advocated cooperation rather than confrontation with Nigeria's mil¬itary government were lynched by a mob of Ogoni youth. Though he was not present, Saro-Wiwa, a leader of the protest movement, was arrested and subsequently sen¬tenced to death along with eight other Ogoni activists.

Despite intensive international pressure that included appeals to Shell to use its influence in the country to gain clemency for the convicted, the executions went ahead as scheduled on November 10, 1995. After the execu¬tions, Shell was criticized in the Western media for its apparent unwillingness to pressure Nigeria's totalitarian regime. The incident started some soul-searching at Shell about the social and environmental responsibility of a multinational corporation in societies such as Nige¬ria that fall short of Western standards for the protection of human rights and the environment.

Background

In 1961, the African nation of Nigeria won indepen¬dence from Britain. At that time, many believed that Nigeria had the potential to become one of the engines of economic growth in Africa. The country was blessed with abundant natural...