THE NATION TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2012
5
NEWS
•Kolawole: jailed for life
• Oderinwale: sentenced for 12 years
•Osoteku: to be sentenced this week
•Odegbune: jailed for life
•Nwokeh: jailed for life
in UK: One week, one trouble Nigeria’s Yinka Shonibare sets record in London
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PIECE of artwork featuring a ship in a bottle which appeared on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth has found a permanent home. Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was on display in London between May 2010 and January 2012. Following a successful public appeal for funds and an Art Fund grant, the work will go on permanent display at the National Maritime Museum in London. The scaled-down replica of HMS Victory will be on view from 25 April. This coincides with the Greenwich museum’s 75th anniversary. Along with a £50,000 from the Art Fund, the public raised the necessary funds - £362,500 - to enable the museum to acquire the work and put it on permanent display. The museum itself contributed £49,100 to the effort, matched by London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, on behalf of Shonibare. “I am absolutely delighted and touched by the public’s generosity,” said British-Nigerian artist Shonibare. “It is testimony to the importance of keeping Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle in the country,” he added. Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was commissioned by the mayor of London and unveiled as the latest occupant of the Fourth Plinth in May 2010. The artwork will stand outside the Maritime Museum’s new Sammy Ofer Wing, where it will be freely accessible to all. Director of the National Maritime Museum, Kevin Fewster, said: “I
am confident our millions of visitors will get great pleasure from it for years to come.” Shonibare’s work measures 4.7 metres in length and 2.8 metres in diameter. The ship’s 27 sails are made of textiles commonly associated with African dress and symbolic of African identity and independence. Shonibare was born in London and moved to Nigeria at the age of three before returning to the UK to study fine art. He currently lives and works in the London’s East End. •Culled from BBC
any way acknowledge responsibility for the killing.” Another Nigerian boy, Femi Oderinwale, 18, was convicted of manslaughter and given 12 years detention. Osoteku will have her day with the law this week for the murder, which took place in March 2010. The seriousness of the involvement of Nigerian teenagers and youths in gangterism in London was further brought to the fore with the conviction last week of Kazeem Kolawole for his role in shooting
utmost gravity. The seriousness is such that a life sentence is necessary to reflect public abhorrence of these offences. Shooting twice into the small and confined shop where it was known there were people present can be denounced as an attack on society itself by men who saw themselves as outside and above the law.” Kolawole was recently spared prison for beating a schoolgirl and was wearing an electronic tag while on bail for carrying a knife.
spree that shocked Britain and was described by a judge as an ‘attack on society itself’. Thusha Kamaleswaran, a teenager, is confined to a wheelchair by the shooting for which Kolawole and others have been jailed for life. Kolawole is a member of Brixton’s Gas - or Guns And Shanks - Gang, responsible for a trail of violence that has devastated parts of South London. Judge Martin Stephens QC said : “This is an exceptional case of the
But it is not only gangsterism that regularly puts Nigerians in the UK on the spotlight. They are also in the news for sham marriages. In January, a corrupt vicar who conducted 28 sham weddings was jailed. Many of his clients were Nigerians. The Rev Canon Dr John Magumba, 58, pocketed at least £8,300 after he agreed to marry Nigerians to Eastern Europeans living in Britain. The unions, said Daily Mail, enabled the Africans to stay in the UK
and claim hundreds of thousands of pounds in benefits. In the scam, European Union citizens would marry Nigerians to gain the right to stay in Britain. Another vicar, Mr. Brian Shipsides, 55, is serving a maximum sentence of 14 years slammed by at Inner London Crown Court for aiding Nigerian sham marriages. A Nigerian woman, Amudalat Ladipo, 31, who acted as a fixer, was convicted of conspiracy to facilitate breaches of immigration laws. One of the Nigerians who got married through the process, Onyeka Nwagbo, 27, has been deported. He was arrested in his “wedding” suit minutes before the ceremony. His fake bride, Julitza Nedd, 23-year-old Swede, received an eight week suspended sentence for assisting illegal immigration. A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “We are actively reviewing all cases where individuals gained the right to live in the UK as a result of a wedding at All Saints during the period in question. Where we have evidence that leave has been granted on the basis of a sham marriage we will look to revoke that right to stay and remove them from the UK. “We will be contacting all of those involved in these weddings and asking them to prove their ceremonies were genuine. “Those who do not do so will have their residency revoked and will be required to leave the UK. Those who fail to do so will face possible enforcement action. “However, in such cases they will have a right of appeal to an immigration judge who will review whether they have provided evidence of a genuine relationship.”
oil spill ’60 times bigger than it claimed’ gulf of Mexico in 2010. “The difference is staggering: even using the lower end of the Accufacts estimate, the volume of oil spilt at Bodo was more than 60 times the volume Shell has repeatedly claimed leaked,” said Audrey Gaughran, director of global issues at Amnesty International. “All oil spill incidents are investigated jointly by communities, regulators, operators and security agencies,” said a Shell spokeswoman in London. “The team visits the site of the incident, determines the cause and volume of spilled oil and impact on the environment, and signs off the findings in a report. This is an independent
process – communities and regulators are all involved. This is the process that was employed with the two spills in question, and we stand by the findings [of 1,640 barrels].” Shell has argued the community prevented the company being allowed near the pipeline to repair it. The amount of oil spilled by Shell at Bodo will be key to a high court case expected to be heard in London later in 2012. Shell is being sued by nearly 11,000 Bodo inhabitants, who say their lives were devastated by the spill which destroyed their fishing grounds, caused long-lasting ill health and polluted fresh water
sources. The community, represented by the London law firm Leigh Day, is thought to be seeking more than $150m (£93m) to clean up the creeks, which, even four years after the spill, remain coated in oil. Oil spill compensation in Nigeria is based largely on the amount of oil spilt. But negotiations over the Bodo spill broke down earlier in 2012 in London when the gap between what Shell was offering and what the community wanted could not be bridged. Neither party can agree on when the 40year-old pipeline started to leak. In a letter to Amnesty International, Shell wrote: “The court will
decide what the volume of the spill was. We suggest you might be better to wait for the authoritative view on the volume of the spill and publish at that stage rather than risk misleading the public with Accufacts estimate.” But this was dismissed by Amnesty’s Gaughran: “Even if we use the start date given by Shell, the volume of oil spilt is far greater than Shell recorded. More than three years after the Bodo oil spill, Shell has yet to conduct a proper cleanup or to pay any official compensation to the affected communities. After years of trying to seek justice in Nigeria, the people of Bodo have now taken their claim
to the UK courts.” “The evidence of Shell’s bad practice in the Niger delta is mounting,” said Patrick Naagbanton, coordinator of the local oil watch group Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD). “Shell seems more interested in conducting a PR operation than a cleanup operation. The problem is not going away; and sadly neither is the misery for the people of Bodo.” Amnesty and CEHRD have repeatedly called for an independent process to investigate oil spills in Nigeria, and an end to the system that allows oil companies to have such influence over the process.