06/28/2025
MOVEMENT FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE OGONI PEOPLE INC USA
(MOSOP-USA)
Website: www.mosop-usa.org
Email: [email protected]
6032614005 9014065468
March 4, 2025
OGONI OIL SHOULD NOT BE A CONDITION FOR OGONIS TO BE RESPECTED AND TREATED AS CITIZENS OF NIGERIA: MOSOP-USA REJECTS THE RESUMPTION OF OIL PRODUCTION IN OGONI.
We the Congress of Ogoni People, the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People in the United States of America (USA), return a NO VERDICT on oil resumption in Ogoni. Since 1958, when Shell discovered and produced crude oil in Ogoni, it has generated enormous earnings for Nigeria and the multinational oil corporations. Yet, Ogoni has received nothing but pollution, degradation, and death. We lack basic social development, such as public safety and healthcare.
No functional public hospitals, schools, good roads, clean tap water, and electricity exist. The Ogoni people are subjected to a slow yet steady death by the Nigerian government. We watched our mangroves wither, our waters and air poisoned, our crops barren, and our children are deprived by the Nigerian State of their present and future before they have a chance to live. They are destroyed for being Ogoni.
When we try to bring this genocidal tendencies and actions to the attention of the Nigerian government, we were ignored. When we peacefully protested the genocide of our people, which included the destruction of our environment, our nonviolent actions were met with violence and terror; inhumanity meted out against us by the Nigerian government and Shell. The Land Used decree disproportionately affects the Ogoni and other Niger Delta communities’ resources while exempting solid mineral-rich regions. This is unfair, unjust and amounts to gross discrimination against Niger Delta oil bearing communities.
Despite contributing over one hundred billion dollars in oil revenues, the Ogoni people stay neglected and met with violence and oppression. Successive Nigerian governments have ignored our demands for environmental restoration and justice. Ogoni has been denied its right to political autonomy, yet the federal government of Nigeria prioritizes oil resumption in Ogoni. It values oil, money, and to further pollute and degrade Ogoni and its people rather than protecting the environment, respecting Ogonis and our cultural heritage.
This approach completely ignores our fundamental rights outlined in the Nigerian Constitution, the African Charter on Human Rights, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Nigeria failed to implement the findings of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in the 2001 case “Social and Economic Rights Action Centre (SERAC) and the Centre for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) v Nigeria.”
Given the foregoing, we vehemently reject oil resumption and insist that if Nigeria wishes to change her acrimonious relationship with the Ogoni people it must do so out of honesty and respect for Ogoni, not for oil resumption. Nigeria's regions, states, or ethnicities benefit from oil-based development, but have no oil. Ogoni, which has provided so much in oil revenue and its Human resources that helped bring civil rule to Nigeria in the 1990s through the people’s sacrifice, deserves better treatment than the shabby treatment it receives. Ogoni deserves fair treatment. It deserves equal treatment as a partner and pertinent stakeholder in the nation’s scheme of things. Consequently, “Confidence-building” would involve creating a state for the Ogoni people.
It would also have required Shell, NNPC, and others to pay the Ogoni people reparations and hold Shell, NNPC, and other operators accountable in Nigerian courts. “Confidence-building” would have involved bringing all oil companies that operated in Ogoni to task for failing to follow their own best practices in their operations in the Niger Delta, and for working with the military governments to repress dissent in Ogoni and other Niger Delta communities.
And “confidence building” would have involved putting measures in place to ensure the heinous crimes of the past are not repeated by the Nigerian government and any other entity. We note that despite efforts to bring attention to the deplorable state of the Port Harcourt-Eleme Federal Road, popularly known as East-West Road, the government has failed to fix it despite the significant loss of life. Instead, it focuses on the resumption of oil.
The growing global momentum for renewable energy and sustainability also presents a future beyond fossil fuels or crude oil. This realization presents an opportunity to chart a course for the Nigerian economy without oil and its attendant challenges, which include pollution and death. Rather than doubling down on oil production in Ogoni, the Nigerian government has an opportunity to halt all manner of corruption and theft of oil and money earned from oil.
It should take a bold and courageous initiative to diversify its economy away from oil, invest in its people, and create a conducive environment for healthy and progressive innovation and creative competition. This move would bring greater prosperity and stability to the country.
Key Demands
1. The Nigerian government or federation must implement the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR). This begins with creating a state for the Ogonis to fulfill the Ogonis' right to political autonomy in Nigeria. This demand is nonnegotiable and a prerequisite for any dialogue with the federal government. It ensures Ogonis' control and management of Ogoni political and economic affairs. It stands for self-determination or self-rule for Ogoni, like those of the about twenty-six out of the current thirty-six states of the federation that Ogoni and Niger Delta oil funded and developed. This state or political autonomy, which is not new to Nigeria but an extant culture, could be called Bori State or any name chosen by or desirable to Ogonis.
2. An Ogoni State or a state for Ogoni must comprise all Ogoni territories and local governments (Khana, Gokana, Tai, Eleme, and Oyigbo) to maintain our unity and strength. We will reject any attempt to separate the Ogoni people into different entities or states. A state for Ogoni will foster development, create jobs, and address the issues of oil spills and pollution in collaboration with the Nigerian government. It will obviously resolve half of the Niger Delta agitation.
3. We call on the Federal Republic of Nigeria to publicly acknowledge and apologize for the historical and ongoing injustices it imposes on the Ogoni people, including environmental devastation, economic exploitation, and human rights abuses. This must accompany a formal commitment to justice, including the comprehensive review of the Military Tribunal’s wrongful trial and convictions before the exoneration of the Ogoni 9 who were wrongfully persecuted and executed. The Ogoni 4 must get the justice and proper burial they deserve, and closure given to their family and Ogonis. Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists who Nigeria and Shell murdered by hanging should be accorded full national honors as heroes, not just of Ogoni, but of Nigeria.
4. We demand the full implementation of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report of August 2011, which calls for Ogoniland's environmental remediation and restoration alongside sustainable development. The clean-up process must be transparent and done to the highest international standards, with the progress checked and evaluated by UNEP or other neutral and credible environmental and scientific bodies agreed upon by the Ogoni people. Discussions of oil resumption while Ogoni land remains catastrophically polluted are non-starters.
5. We seek fair compensation and reparations for the communities affected by environmental damage, health issues, and economic losses from oil extraction. Despite international awareness of our plight, Nigeria and Shell are not held accountable by the international community for their actions, and crimes against Ogoni, including the sacking and destruction of many Ogoni communities. We demand the return and rehabilitation of Ogonis sacked from their ancestral communities in the Oyigbo region in 1994, suffering as internal refugees in their country, Nigeria, and statelessness in the Benin Republic.
6. MOSOP-USA demands an immediate Environmental Assessment and Health Impact Study (EAHIS) in Ogoni to evaluate and ascertain whether the discussion of oil production is reasonable, feasible, morally right, and environmentally right for Ogoni land and people.
We conclude by restating our position of saying “NO” to oil resumption and noting that no group of elites is qualified to negotiate oil resumption against the collective will of the Ogoni people. Ogoni oil is stained with blood, and blood is thicker than oil. Therefore, we request that the elites cease making statements to the contrary.
A unified agreement among Ogoni civil society groups, politicians, chiefs, elders, farmers, fishermen and women, the youths, and all citizens of Ogoni is essential for any progress to be made.
Signed by MOSOP-USA Delegates on behalf of MOSOP and Ogoni People in USA
