Environmentalist Bassey receives 2024 Wallenberg Medal, delivers lecture

Renown global environmental activist and Executive Director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) Nnimmo Bassey, will today, Tuesday, September 10, receive the 2024 Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan, at the Ross School of Business Robertson Auditorium.

Bassey will also deliver the 29th Wallenberg Lecture, “We Are Relatives,” centring on love, humility, dignity and respect in his vision of a liveable future for all beings, thus becoming the first Nigerian to do so.

The University, in a post on its website, announced Bassey as the 30th recipient of the global award.

At the lecture, Urban Ahlin, ambassador of Sweden to the United States, will discuss the life of Raoul Wallenberg, the U-M alumnus and Swedish diplomat whose legacy the Wallenberg Medal commemorates by honouring humanitarians across generations.

The Wallenberg Medal is awarded by the University of Michigan to outstanding humanitarians whose actions on behalf of the defenceless and oppressed reflect the heroic commitment and sacrifice of the late Swedish diplomat. Both the Award and Lecture honour the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg, who graduated from the U-M College of Architecture in 1935 and saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews near the end of World War II. In 1944, at the request of Jewish organizations and the American War Refugee Board, the Swedish Foreign Ministry sent Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest.

Over six months, Wallenberg issued thousands of protective passports and placed many thousands of Jews in safe houses throughout the besieged city. He confronted Hungarian and German forces to secure the release of Jews, whom he claimed were under Swedish protection and saved more than 80,000 lives.

In a statement congratulating Bassey on the award, the Executive Director of Corporate, Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), Mr. Akinbode Oluwafemi, congratulated Bassey on his well-deserved recognition as a recipient of the prestigious 2024 Wallenberg Medal.

He observed that by this award, Dr. Bassey becomes the first Nigerian and fifth African to be so honoured after South Africans Helen Suzman and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rwandan Paul Rusesabagina, and Congolese Denis Mukwege.

OLuwafemi said: “This award affirms global recognition of Dr. Nnimmo Bassey’s exceptional impact. Bassey is synonymous with pristine work and relentless pursuit of environmental justice and accountability, notwithstanding formidable challenges, especially in addressing the root cause of issues driving climate migration, environmental and social impacts of extractive production, and hunger. CAPPA, alongside environmental advocates in Africa and across the world, is excited to celebrate this recognition.”

Previous award recipients include the 14th Dalai Lama, Romanian American Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, American politician and civil rights activist John Robert Lewis, and Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, among others.

Bassey is an architect, director of the Nigeria-based ecological think-tank HOMEF, and member of the steering committee of Oilwatch International, a network resisting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction in the Global South. He chaired Friends of the Earth International (2008-2012), was a co-recipient of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” and received the Rafto Human Rights Prize in 2012.

He received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of York (U.K.) in 2019 and York University (Canada) in 2023. Bassey’s books include “To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction” and “The Climate Crisis in Africa and Oil Politics: Echoes of Ecological War.” His poetry collections include “We Thought It Was Oil But It Was Blood,” “I Will Not Dance to Your Beat” and “I See the Invisible.”