How Much Is a Dead Nigerian Worth to Shell?

Paul Taggart / WpN The Dutch oil giant will pay out a paltry $15 million to the families of 10 murdered Nigerians, including activist Ken Saro-Wiwa—and it will admit no wrongdoing in their deaths. True-crime author Joe McGinniss smells a rat.

Talk about ending with a whimper, not a bang.

Or, to put it more crassly, how much is a dead Nigerian worth, anyway?

In 1996, one year after author and human-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine others were hung in Nigeria, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit in U.S. federal court, charging that the executions were carried out with the knowledge and “consent and/or support” of Shell Oil, as part of an alleged conspiracy with the Nigerian government to suppress opposition to drilling in the Niger Delta.

The life of an Ogoni, the ethnic minority in whose behalf Ken Saro-Wiwa gave his own, is worth less than a top Cravath Swaine litigator makes in a year.

The suit—which relied upon the long-forgotten 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act to argue that U.S. courts had jurisdiction—was filed, dismissed, appealed, refiled, amended, appealed, reinstated, re-dismissed, re-amended, reinstated, etc., for 13 years. (The full record of the case is available here.)

Finally, in late May, it was scheduled for trial before U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood in New York City. Then came a series of last-minute postponements, indicating that settlement talks had reached an advanced stage. The settlement was announced late Monday, and its terms lead back to the question of how much a Nigerian life is worth.

Based on the $15.5 million settlement, a Nigerian life—or, to be more specific, the life of an Ogoni, the ethnic minority in whose behalf Ken Saro-Wiwa gave his own—is worth less than a top Cravath Swaine litigator makes in a year. Figure it this way: $15.5 million divided among 10 plaintiffs comes to $1.5 million per executed Nigerian. Can we assume that the Cravath partners defending Shell in the Wiwa case earned less than $1.5 million per person last year?

To put it in perspective, only minutes after the Associated Press moved the story about the Shell settlement, Reuters posted one that said, “Evergreen Investments agreed Monday to pay more than $40 million to settle state and federal regulators’ charges that it overstated the value of one of its mutual funds” (emphasis added). Overstating value is almost three times as bad as hanging 10 innocent men? Only in America.

But what’s even worse is that, according to the settlement, “the company acknowledged no wrongdoing in the 1995 hanging deaths...” Every day since November 10, 1995, when the bodies of Saro-Wiwa and the nine others were dumped in an unmarked grave, the Ogoni people have cried out for justice. Until Monday, they had believed that the suit against Shell would deliver it.