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at the DGH 5th Annual General Assembly - August, 2000
For some time, my wife has been speaking out on issues of human rights and social justice in Burma. And for some reason or another Burma, Nigeria and East Timor seemed tied together in the mid-90's in universities across the country. Often, wherever we went to speak out against the brutal government in Burma, we found people speaking about the same in Nigeria and East Timor. One year, I attended a conference where one of the speakers was a physician from Nigeria, which I thought would be interesting. I went to listen to him speak about the issues of the Ogoni people, the issues of transnational corporations, in particular Shell, and what they were doing to the people of the Niger Delta.
What I heard was this physician put it all in the perspective of a human rights paradigm. I learned that he was living in Toronto and thought I could network him into people who were interested in health and human rights in the United States because it is always good to be networked together. So I approached him afterwards and told him that there is a growing movement in this country and I would like to introduce him to some of the people involved in that movement. I was studying public health at that time and discovered that Owens was going to be getting his Master of Public Health degree at Johns Hopkins the year after me. As you can see, our lives came together in the mid-90's and haven't separated since.
So it is my pleasure to introduce to you a person who is nothing more than a simple country doctor who unfortunately, after his brother the playwright and Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hung by the Abacha regime, was forced into the international limelight to continue the struggle for the Ogoni people: Dr. Owens Wiwa.
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The Ogoni in Nigeria By Owens Wiwa, MD, MPH |
I come from Ogoni. Ogoni is a small place, only 12 miles by 35 miles and home to half a million people. We are in a country of 118 million right now. Since we are small in a big country our rights are likely to be trampled upon, and our rights were trampled upon. Ogoni is very rich in oil.
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| Owens Wiwa came from Canada to speak at the 2000 DGH General Assembly at Ft. Yargo, Georgia. |
I registered for the medical school in 1983, did my internship in Nigeria and then went to Britain to do a stint in respiratory medicine (you'll understand why I did respiratory medicine later as I go on). Then I came back home, worked in several parts of Nigeria and finally decided to return to my village, Ogoni. I set up a small clinic and I was busy. I was working 18 to 20 hours a day and I also made some money, which allowed me to travel a lot. I was going to Britain about 3 times a year on holidays. But in 1990 a lot of things changed.
A movement arose that came to be called MOSOP, Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. MOSOP was started by my elder brother Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a writer. He had written 30 books (poetry, short stories) and he produced a television series. He produced a sitcom in Nigeria that was watched by 30 million people every week and they did 72 episodes. He was well known, having won some international prizes for writing, and he had traveled all around the world. He had gone to more than 40 countries by the time I got to know where England was. He was a man of the world. But he wasn't happy that his people, the Ogoni people, were living in abject poverty despite the fact that we lived on one of the richest pieces of land on Earth. They were poor and they were always sick-well that is why I was working 18 hours a day and making a lot of money. MOSOP started talking about the effects of oil extraction on the lives of the Ogoni people, about the fact that the company was using a very bad metal to extract the oil and in the process was destroying the river, poisoning the air, and oil spills were destroying the land. The people were not only sick, they were too poor to get good medical care.
| “I believe that most of the corruption, the poverty and some of the wars that are going on in Africa, are due to the activities of the transnational corporations.” |
Less than three months later my brother was arrested for a murder he didn't commit and I was declared wanted for the same murder. I entered the Nigerian underground to evade capture and I was lucky enough to meet several Ambassadors who directed me to see the head of Shell in Nigeria. I went to see the head of Shell in Nigeria and he told me that if I wrote a press release saying that Shell was not responsible for the environmental destruction than my brother and the others would be freed. Of course, there was no way I could do that. To make a very long story short, my brother was hung by the military dictator Abacha, with eight of my friends, for something they didn't do. I escaped through three African countries. Luckily, I somehow made it to England and then I went to Canada, where I became an exile refugee. From Canada I went to Johns Hopkins and then back to Toronto, where I am now working as a research scientist looking at the stress of exiles and its relationship to the reactivation of tuberculosis. That is one aspect of my life. The other aspect, the reason why I am here, has to do with issues of health, environmental justice and human rights. I, and several others in exile, want to go back home. And I've asked myself, "What do I do when I am home? And what do I do before I go back to my country?"
I've just seen many of the slides that were shown before in the presentation about DGH's work in Uganda and they remind me of my country. I was particularly touched by the slide where you have the hospital that doesn't have enough physicians to treat the patients or to teach others who will be treating the patients. I felt very guilty being here in the West, because I should be in Africa. I want to be in Africa. But if I go back to my home today, Shell will be frightened. And a frightened transnational corporation can do anything to get rid of the threat.
I could talk about the Nigerian government and the human rights abuses they commit. I could also talk about the inefficiency of the health system in Nigeria. But to tell you all that would waste a lot of time. I would be saying what you know and possibly something that you can't influence, to be frank. Well, there is something you can influence, because I believe that most of the corruption, the poverty and some of the wars that are going on in Africa, are due to the activities of the transnational corporations. If you have any doubts about what I am saying, think about where there are problems now in Africa: in the Sudan, in Congo, in Angola, in Nigeria itself, in Sierra Leone. If you go back and look at what is causing these problems, it is due to difficulties in access to either gold mines, diamond mines or oil. At the bottom of this are transnational corporations and the governments backing these transnational corporations, which supply the weapons of destruction, the arms, to the warring factors. Or if there are no warring factors, they create them, divide the people so that they can continue to fight, so the corporations get the resources on the cheapest terms.
Well, as physicians what can we do? There are several things that can be done, some of which a few of us started at home. Speaking out against the corporations about the diseases that they cause directly due to the toxins, the pollution that they create directly or indirectly through the ecosystem destruction they produce when they are extracting their wealth. In either way, I have discovered that shareholders listen a lot when you put it out to them in statistics, that in order to produce this wealth for their profits some people die from diseases caused by the companies that are producing their wealth. I believe that shareholders can actually force or influence the oppressors to change their methods. I am not saying they shouldn't create wealth. I am not against the creation of wealth. But please don't kill the people who live in those areas where you are creating the wealth. That is the paradigm that I am working from.
I have come here today to listen to what you do and to plead with you to extend your services to Nigeria and to Africa as a whole. On my own, what I do specifically is look for environmentally challenged communities, which are often very vulnerable, not only to the diseases caused by pollution, but also to infectious diseases. I, and a few of my friends, have formed a non-profit NGO called AFRIDA, which works in the same paradigm as MOSOP.
What we try to do is identify, investigate and analyze information from environmentally challenged communities in Africa; build schools, clinics and vision centers; provide health programs, including reproductive health, and emergency and mental health services to these communities; plant trees, fruits and other produce, because that is something that the people need a lot (there used to be a lot of fruit trees when I was young, but now all those trees are gone). We also provide educational services to schools in Africa.
We do a lot of speaking tours. Schools that we have visited in America, especially high schools in Canada, have provided funds to build two health centers in Ogoni and to repair a hospital that was damaged. All that we did was present to the school what was happening in these communities and showed them a video about the community and they were moved to do this. After that we connected the school with the community. Then we were left out of the loop. Now they are talking amongst themselves.
One of the projects that the public school teachers in Canada did was to raise money to train midwives and community health workers in my village and that has actually helped a lot. Those are the small projects that we have started doing and they range from two to three thousand dollars in cost for each project. Of course we would like to expand. I will discuss how we can cooperate to make this available to other communities in Africa and in the Niger Delta with the DGH Board tomorrow. I would like to thank John once again for making it possible for me to be here and also to all of you for listening to this boring story. Thank you so much.
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