Gyrating on His Daddy’s Empty Grave

I have never met Ken Wiwa, the son of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa in person. But I sensed something awkward about him a few years ago when I read his memoir, In the Shadow of A Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy. That awkward thing was the feeling that in spite of the book he still seemed clueless about that legacy, which his father who was hanged November 10, 1995 by the then Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha on trumped-up charges created through his activist quest for justice for his nationality, the Ogoni and left behind.

The late Saro-Wiwa was a genuine activist who came through the ranks and kept growing all the way in his quest for justice and equal treatment for his Ogoni nationality. Up until his life was snuffed out in the noose that fateful day, he didn’t recant his conviction that the Nigerian supra-national state as it’s currently structured cannot deliver justice, fair play, talk less of economic, social and political development to the nationalities that were made to constitute it.

In the review piece that I wrote on the young Ken Wiwa’s book for an irregular column that I used to write in TheNews magazine, Lagos, I still recall mentioning that the young Wiwa appeared in the book to be on a celebrity chasing mission as opposed to a quest to understand his late activist father’s legacy.

Well, I confirmed that feeling as fact Monday this week after I read a story in the New York Times on Mr. Musa Yar’Adua, who as Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s hand-picked successor as the president of Nigeria emerged the “winner” of what has been roundly condemned by local and international observers as the worst election that they have seen in their lives. My jaw dropped when a read a quote by Mr. Ken Wiwa, who was described as Mr. Yar’Ardua’s spokesman in which he brushed aside complaints about the unparalleled fraud, violence, etc. that characterized the exercise as baseless: “The elections are over. We’re now faced with moving Nigeria forward”, he was quoted to have said.

It’s been awhile since it was announced that the young Ken Wiwa had been appointed an adviser by Mr. Obasanjo. Some people, including me thought at the time that the young man would be hesitant to let Mr. Obasanjo who has refused to even oblige him the demand to exhume his late father’s bones from the mass grave where he was dumped with the other eight Ogoni activists after they were hanged by Abacha and his regime for proper burial, to placate him with a sweet appointment. To the fact that the grave where he performed funeral rites on for his late father is still hollow. One didn’t have the least suspicion that he accepted the appointment quite alright and was only kept waiting in the flanks for this moment when he’d be used to play a normalization role for Mr. Obasanjo. Come to think of it, young Ken Wiwa will do so in what will obviously become a regime that lacks legitimacy, and is headed by one of those his late father fought till death for inflicting environmental degradation and poverty on the Ogoni even as they siphon away enormous oil wealth from under their homestead, farmlands, creeks, and waterways.

If young Ken Wiwa’s new role is his way of continuing the quest for self-definition that he mentioned somewhere in his book as a pre-occupation that has always tugged his conscience, well, he certainly has betrayed his late father’s activist challenge to the forces that despoil the Ogoni environment and keep them poor! Guilt should tug at that conscience of his too. Even in the mass grave where his bones lay, Ken Saro-Wiwa will find space to roil in discomfort over his son’s choice to gyrate atop the empty grave that his son is satisfied with as his father's final resting place. The consolation in this, is that the late activist's bones are safely elsewhere.