In Nigeria, villains rarely die, they often wait for a future president to turn them into heroes. Last week, President Bola Tinubu conferred national honours on the four Ogoni chiefs brutally murdered in 1994. They were Albert Badey, Edward Kobani, Samuel Orage, and Theophilus Orage, an act that reopens one of the darkest and most controversial chapters of our history.
But there is an irony here. For nearly three decades, General Sani Abacha has been demonised as the villain of the Ogoni crisis, painted as the dictator who crushed dissent and executed Ken Saro-Wiwa. What is often erased from the story, however, is that Abacha did not stand idly by when the Ogoni chiefs were murdered. He set up a tribunal, brought the perpetrators to book, and in doing so sought justice for the men whose memories are now being honoured by the same class of politicians and activists who once branded him a monster.
The narrative has always been selective. While the West and local opposition figures — NADECO chief among them — painted Saro-Wiwa’s trial as an attack on free speech, they ignored the slain Ogoni elders whose deaths triggered the process. Abacha’s government stood for them when almost nobody else did. Yet history was rewritten to make him the sole villain, erasing the voices and blood of the Ogoni chiefs.
Now, with Tinubu, a former NADECO leader who once mobilized the world to sanction Nigeria over this very crisis — bestowing honours on the same chiefs, the cookie has truly come home to roost. It is an unspoken confirmation that Abacha was right to demand justice, and that the lives of those chiefs mattered as much as Saro-Wiwa’s.
What this moment demands is honesty. If Nigeria is now collectively recognizing the Ogoni Four as heroes whose unjust killing shaped our history, then we must also admit that Abacha, demonized in life and death, stood on the side of their justice. He may have his failings like every ruler, but on this matter, history owes him an apology.
Because in truth, the man we condemned for tyranny was, at least in this chapter, the one who sought to give voice to the silenced and justice to the slain.
