“I hereby give the CON award to Ken Saro Wiwa and OON to the remaining Ogoni 8 and also grant them a State FULL PARDON” – President Bola Ahmed Tinubu
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu today granted posthumous national honours and presidential pardons to Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other members of the Ogoni Eight. These were men who were executed in 1995 by the military regime of General Sani Abacha under circumstances that remain deeply controversial.
While I acknowledge the symbolic importance of this gesture and the possible sense of relief it may offer to the bereaved families, I am also compelled to ask: Pardon for what?
Let’s not forget what this word (pardon) fundamentally means. It implies wrongdoing. It suggests guilt. It infers that those who are being pardoned were, in the eyes of the law and society, justly convicted and are now being shown mercy.
Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow Ogoni activists were not terrorists, criminals, or economic saboteurs. They were environmental and human rights crusaders, victims of a military dictatorship that sought to silence dissent with bullets and bayonets. Their only “crime” was daring to speak truth to power, to challenge a foreign oil company environmental exploitation of Ogoniland, and to demand justice for their people in a country where oil wealth often meant misery for host communities.
The curse of Oloibiri!
The trial that led to their deaths was marred by lack of due process, allegations of bribed witnesses, and global condemnation. It is not a matter of mere opinion; it is historical fact that the tribunal that sentenced them was widely denounced as a sham.
To now issue a pardon, nearly 30 years after they were hanged, is to quietly reaffirm that they were rightly convicted in the first place. It lends false legitimacy to an act that was an egregious miscarriage of justice by all moral and objective standards.
I feel what would have been more appropriate and indeed more powerful is an exoneration, not a pardon. To exonerate is to say you were wrongfully accused and condemned. That is the truth of the Ogoni Nine. That is the honour they deserve.
The families of these heroes, and indeed all of Nigeria, deserve more than symbolic gestures. They deserve the truth, officially stated and recognized.
They deserve to see history corrected, not just commemorated.
The memories of these heroes deserve clarity, not compromise or shrouded in English definitions.
A pardon, however well-intentioned, falls short. Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand English enough. I hold it that, the legacy of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues is too important, too sacred, to be framed by the language of guilt.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must be commended for taking a bold step toward healing; but let that healing be rooted in truth, not tokenism.
They were not criminals. They were not convicts. They were heroes. They deserve to be remembered and officially declared — as such!
Taofik Adekunle Jimoh (JAAT) is the Editor of News Bulletin Nigeria.
