Read the latest insights and analysis from the experts at Oil Change International.
The oil giant Shell spends millions of dollars each year to anticipate the future to try and predict the unpredictable. In a corporate game of crystal-ball gazing, Shell likes to play the long game, looking decades into the future to predict upcoming geopolitical or technological trends.
Today marks the twenty seventh anniversary of the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other members of the Ogoni 9. They were murdered in 1995 by the Nigerian junta for their peaceful campaign to highlight the ecological destruction and environmental racism of Shell’s operations in Nigeria.
We ask you to vote for Shell in Corporate Accountability’s Hall of Shame for denying justice in Nigeria for a generation and for delaying action on climate change.
Another grim, painful milestone is reached. It is now a quarter of a century since Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni 9 were murdered in Nigeria by Shell.
On November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists — Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, and John Kpuine — were hanged by the Nigerian dictatorship in Port Harcourt. Their only crime? Exposing the devastating impact that Shell Petroleum Development Company’s extraction of fossil fuels from the Niger Delta had on the Ogoni land, lives, and livelihoods.
Shell’s latest grotesque greenwashing propaganda was put out for International Women’s day, when the company rebranded its logo to “She’ll”, along with the strapline: “#Makethefuture gender balanced.”
“Shell’s concern, deeper than its fossil-fuel identity and more urgent than the climate crisis, is Shell. I don’t believe it’s going to lead us to the Paris climate goals, and Shell probably doesn’t believe it will either.”
2020 is the year that the chickens finally come home to roost for Shell. It can evade justice no more. It has run out of places to hide.
It is now 24 years since the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and other Ogoni in Nigeria in 1995. The Ogoni 9, as they are called, were murdered for their campaign against the oil giant Shell, whose rampant double standards and pollution had caused the Ogoni community to mobilise.
At a trial in the Hague, three witnesses testify they were bribed by Shell to give evidence against Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni 9 in the nineties.
