How we made weapons, refineries for Biafran –Civil-war scientist, Oragwu

By Sunday Ani

 It is 47 years since the civil war ended, but the feat of Dr. Felix N. C Oragwu, one of the Biafran scientists, who fabricated weapons, built airports and refineries for the new republic, is still being remembered. A 1960 graduate of Physics from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, he was a key figure in the Research and Production section of Biafra.

In this exclusive interview, Oragwu, a native of Idemili North Local Government Area of Anambra State, takes a look at the circumstances that led to the war, the exploits of the Biafran scientists and the current agitation for the sovereign state of Biafra, among other knotty issues.  

 

You were one of the scientists involved in the production of local bombs and other weapons for the Biafran soldiers during the 30 months civil war from 1967-1970. What are your reminiscences of the war period and the probable cause of the war?

I will give you the true story about the civil war because I was involved very actively. Not only that I was active, I was also one of the key figures in Research and Production (RAP), which was a body of scientists, engineers and technicians that produced all the weapons used to fight the war. Before the war, the whole eastern Nigeria had no factory that produced weapons and they could not import weapons from anywhere during the war because they were blockaded. So, I can tell you because I am one of the surviving people in the team now; I am almost 82 years old now.

Before independence in 1960, the eastern and northern Nigeria formed a political alliance. The North had a political party called the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) led by Ahmadu Bello. The party controlled the 19 states that make up the North today. Dr. Namdii Azikiwe led the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroun (NCNC). Cameroun, before the 1914/1918 World War, was a German colony. When France and Britain defeated Germany in the war, they took over Cameroun from Germany and shared it between themselves. One part went to France while the other part went to Britain. Britain took its own and joined it with the eastern Nigeria because it was very close to Ogoja, in the present-day Akaw Ibom State. That was how the name National Council of Nigeria and Cameroun came about. That was the party led by Dr. Azikiwe.

Then, there was another party, the Action Group (AG) led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. It was predominantly a Yoruba party. To my knowledge, before 1954, no person from outside Yoruba land was a member of AG. Dr. Azikiwe’s NCNC had a lot of people from all over the country because he was brought up in Lagos. So, he had people, such as Herbert Macaulay, Benson, Olusanya and others. The Yoruba and the Igbo formed the NCNC. The AG was basically to take care of the Yoruba race; these are facts.

During the 1959 election, Northern Nigeria had majority of the members in the National Assembly. It had 175 members. The East and West together had a total of 157 members. That means that if, as they normally do, the whole North voted one way, they already had the majority, no matter what happened. But, NPC tried to ensure that it was not the North alone that was ruling and that was why it went into alliance with a party it felt it could deal with, the NCNC. So, the NPC and the NCNC formed alliance to form the NCNC/NPC government at independence in 1960. The two parties formed the central government, while the AG formed the western Nigeria government.

 

Tell us more about the NCNC/NPC alliance…

Normally, the NCNC/NPC alliance ought to have taken somebody like Dr. Azikiwe as a prime minister because he was already a university graduate. Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who became the prime minister had only a higher elementary certificate but Dr. Azikiwe said in the interest of everybody, he didn’t mind playing the second fiddle as governor general so that the party that had the majority ruled. That was the basis of NPC ruling Nigeria – based on the population. Things worked well until 1962, when the NPC/NCNC central government suddenly found out that it was having a lot of problems with the AG and wanted to bring it to order. What did they do? They said people of the present Edo and Delta states were not Yoruba and they decided to create Mid-Western Nigeria for them. And because they had the power and the majority, they created it since the national parliament had the powers to do so. That was where the trouble started.

Chief Awolowo said if you removed Edo and Delta from the West because they are not Yoruba, then you must remove Ibibio, Efik and Rivers from the East because they also are not Igbo. He said Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers Province, as it was then called, must be removed from the East because they are not Igbo. He also told Ahmadu Bello that Middle Belt should also be removed from the North because they are not Hausa/Fulani and that was how confusion came into Nigeria. That was where the battle started. Then, this battle continued until the deputy leader of the AG, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, was convinced to ally with the North against Chief Awolowo and that brought a division in AG. Chief Awolowo started fighting them and they accused him of treason. He was arrested, tried and jailed in Calabar Prison.

Dr. Azikiwe, on ascension to the office of the governor-general, had already handed over the leadership of eastern government to Dr. Michael Okpara, who felt that the faction of Chief Awolowo’s AG and the NCNC were more progressive than the other group. So, an amalgamation of AG and NCNC formed what was called the United Progressives Grand Alliance (UPGA), while the other people formed the Nigeria National Alliance (NNA).

When these two groups were set up, there was a change in political fight. So, by 1964 when there was a new election into the National Assembly, the thing crystallised and UPGA said it was going to boycott the election. But when it was election time, the AG section of UPGA broke the accord and contested election with NNA, abandoning Dr. Okpara’s group and this resulted in a situation where they could now form a government. So, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa told Okpara that since his people didn’t take part in the election, he had reserved some ministerial slot for him, pending when he was through his own election. So, it was the NNA group that decided who the minister from UPGA would be.

 

There were elections into regional assemblies. What happened?

After that, it was time for election into the regional houses of assembly, while Chief Awolowo remained in prison. Chief Akintola, who had gone into alliance with NNA, got all the 49 members of the Western Region, while the AG didn’t even get one seat. The result was controversial because records showed that the election results were announced a night before the Election Day. While all these were going on, most of Chief Awolowo’s supporters, such as Sam Aluko and so many others, were appointed as lecturers at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1964, while others remained at the then University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU). It was these incidents that led to military insurrection in 1966. From the records we have, only five officers in the rank of major planned the coup. The five officers were Emmanuel Ifeajuna, who was a graduate; Ademola Ademoyega, also a graduate; Chukwuma Nzeogwu, who had only a school certificate; Anuforo, a graduate and Onwuatuegwu. They were the people who planned the coup, apparently, supporting UPGA. They said the issue was corruption. They killed Ahmadu Bello, Akintola, Tafawa Balewa, Festus Okotie-Eboh and all the brigadiers, who were supporting Ahmadu Bello and Akintola. So, they killed all the regional leaders, who were premiers and their deputies; four military personnel from the North were all killed, but not even a single Igbo political or military leader was killed.

Col. Unegbe was killed not because he supported anybody but because he refused to release the keys to the amoury. After the coup, the Senate president, acting for Dr. Azikiwe, who was away when this happened, called on Major General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, to take over government and he did.

Aguiyi-Ironsi destroyed the federal structure and rendered all of them as provinces. Between January 15, 1966 and July 29, 1966, Nigeria’s federal structure was destroyed, although the semblance was still there, they became administrative units in such a way that anybody could be anywhere. You can take a soldier from the North and make him head of administrative unit in the East; that was the position.

 

We learnt that this was the beginning of problem in the country. What do you think?

Now, on February 23, 1966, the Ijaw leaders led by Harold Biriye and Adaka Boro said they were seceding from the eastern Nigeria and also from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Then, Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi, as head of the federal military government, fought them and after 12 days of fighting, they were arrested, tried in a court of law in Port Harcourt and sentenced to death by hanging. They were taken to Ikoyi Prisons to await death by hanging. They were still waiting to be killed when the Hausa military leaders decided to go on a revenge mission and that was how Aguiyi-Ironsi was overthrown on July 29, 1966 in a counter military coup, signaling the emergence of then Col. Yakubu Gowon, later General, as the head of state. And General Gowon inherited Ironsi’s unitary decree, which brought about the unitary government, as opposed to the Federal Government we had before.

After the incident, a lot of things happened prompting the East to say it wanted to secede from Nigeria. A peace meeting was convened in Aburi, Ghana, between the Federal Government of Gowon and the eastern government led by Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. Decisions reached at the meeting later came to be known as the Aburi Accord. The Nigeria delegation came back and refused to implement the agreements reached at Aburi and the people of the Eastern Nigeria insisted on the Aburi Accord. In fact, the catch phrase, ‘On Aburi We Stand,’ was what led to the 30 months bloody civil war.

 

Were you conscripted into the Biafran Army or you join voluntarily?

I have never been in the army. Now, let me tell you what happened during the war. During the polarisation, all the Igbo scientists in Ahmadu Bello University, University of Lagos, University of Ife and University of Ibadan, except Ukpabi Asika and one or two others, went to UNN to help form the East Central State. When the war started, they found out that they had no weapon and there was no way they could fight a war with their bare hands. That was how the scientists, engineers, technologists, technicians both from the university, civil service and private sector came together and decided to do something.

 

You were said to have led the scientists…

In science and technology, you don’t have a leader; everybody contributes but one is a key figure in whatever happens. So, we came together to see what we could do, in order to help them. If you read my book, the total amoury of the eastern government at the outbreak of the war was not enough to equip three soldiers. We could not import weapons, even if we had the money because we were blockaded by land, sea and air. That was how the science and technology group emerged. Three groups – those at UNN; those working with Shell BP at Port Harcourt and the civil servants in Enugu –came together at Nsukka and merged with the Enugu group to form science and technology group with a subsidiary in Port Harcourt.

 

What were your major challenges then?

First of all, we had to produce all the weapons; all the products – kerosene, petrol and diesel because we couldn’t import. We had to produce food items. We had to have an airport because when we lost Enugu and Port Harcourt airports, we had no other airport. So, we had to build two airports: one at Uli and the second one at Aguata. The Uli airport was the one working; the other one at Aguata was on standby, just in case. There was no petrol anywhere; we built a refinery at Uzuakoli without assistance from anywhere and solved the problem of petrol. When Uzuakoli was under threat, we moved to Amanduba, very close to Owerri and repeated it. We built another one at Azia, in Anambra because we could not afford to take chances. If any of them was destroyed and you didn’t have an alternative, you are finished because your soldiers would not be able to move.

We also set up mini-refineries. We converted oil mills where palm oil was processed to mini-refineries. We used the infrastructure to produce petrol and you know in Physics and Chemistry, refinery is no more than distillation plants. Any time you take a crude and heat it up at certain temperature in a distillation plant, the first thing that will come out is petrol; the next one is diesel; the third one is kerosene and then the aviation gas, after which you will get sloppy things or grease and that is what is called petro-chemical. We could get to the petro-chemical grade because we needed a lot of equipment, although we had the capacity to do it then if we had the material. That capacity was not acquired before the war; it was acquired on the job.

If you people were able to achieve such feats over three decades ago, why are we still having the problem of refining petroleum products in Nigeria today?

That’s a good question. You see, nobody wanted to give any credit to what happened in Biafra. In fact, it was an anathema to mention it. I was the first person that had the courage to put it down. After the war, the key members of RAP, such as Prof Goddy Ezekwe, a mechanical engineer; Prof Chimere Ikokwu, a chemist; Prof J.O.C Ezilo, who was the first professor of mathematics in Nigeria; Ben Nwosu, a physicist like me; Mark Chijioke, an associate professor of electrical/electronics; Njoku Obi, a professor of Microbiology in charge of drugs and vaccines, all went back to the university to teach. By the time we came back, UNN was finished; there was nothing there. We had to set it up afresh, using the same experience we acquired during the war. The Federal Government set up a committee to investigate us and sent the equivalent of EFCC and DSS to talk to us and find out why we did what we did.

The first group that was called included myself, Prof Ikokwu, Prof Ezilo and Prof Ezewke. Four of us went to see them at Enugu from Nsukka. They called me first, probably, because they found out that I was the head of research and planning and they asked me why I was fighting against the Federal Government. I told them that I didn’t know what they were talking about because I didn’t even know them. They were taken aback because we were all on slippers. I told them that I was trained as a physicist and I realised that physics is the father or mother of technology and that I was training people to use physics to develop a country; it is not physics for its own sake. I told them that if I taught people, some of them would teach others, but some would use it to produce technology. So, I told them if it was because of that they called me, it was true because I was a very key member in that job. I told them I was very happy with what we did because first of all, it changed the whole perspective. Britain told us that we just got a degree and every time we mentioned it and never did anything with it. They said we couldn’t produce a pin.

I told them that in spite of all our efforts, we cannot produce any technology and that the local bomb, Ogbuniwe, was a new weapon entirely produced by us and nobody took it up. So, when I finished, they were having altercations among themselves and I told them to report back that I did all those things during the war and that I was ready to die if that was what they wanted but they should first allow me to go back and teach my Physics. That was what I told them and they asked me to go out. They later called me and told me that they were very happy when a man had courage about his own conviction. Then, others went in, had the same experience and we all went back to the university.

In fairness, two years after this, I got a letter from the Federal Government cabinet office in 1972, saying that they wanted to set up National Science and Technology Council and they wanted somebody to help in developing it and they found me with a lot of knowledge and experience. That was how I left Nsukka for the cabinet office and they called me the chief scientist to the government. They said the job was for two years but when General Gowon was overthrown and General Murtala Muhammed came, I told him I was going because the contract was for two years. He said I shouldn’t go. That was how I continued and from there they made me director and all that until 1987 when I retired.

To answer your question directly, we have not been able to refine petroleum products effectively in Nigeria in spite of what we did during the war because government did not follow up on some of the things we told them we did.

 

How do you feel about the renewed agitation for the creation of the Sovereign State of Biafra?

The agitation by the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) came out of Biafra. We wanted to secede because the Federal Government failed to implement Aburi Accord but because they had superior power, they said we could not secede. They took us back to Nigeria after fighting for 30 months, just like they took Niger Delta people back to Nigeria. To understand my thinking about all these, if we don’t restructure Nigeria into a true federation, just like I told you about the United Kingdom, Nigeria will never have peace and there will never be progress because when the federating units compete among themselves, as obtained in the First Republic, they make progress. In our time, there was nothing like federal character; there was nothing like marginalisation; nobody was fighting.

Now, you have a situation where different nationalities were brought together without their consent on how to be together. Unfortunately, it has been done and a constitution has been set up, but we have not operated that constitution. So, my view is that you can only leave Nigeria through the constitution or a referendum. If you do it by force, it may not work; it has not worked anywhere. For example, Niger Delta people wanted to secede from the Eastern Nigeria, they were brought back. The Igbo tried to secede from Nigeria, they were brought back. So, the Igbo cannot leave Nigeria by force or rather by secession. They can only leave Nigeria by mutual agreement of all the constituent units that make up Nigeria. If we don’t do that, we will be killing ourselves for nothing.

In the long term interest of Igbo, what they should be fighting for is a true federation that gives them autonomy to manage themselves; that is what they need. If they don’t do that, they won’t get anything. A new leadership is urgently needed in Igbo land. I can’t see leaders like Azikiwe, Okpara, Akanu Ibiam, Aniago and so on. Nobody took over from them. All the people we have now have been making arrangement with those cheating us.

 

Did you ever have a close shave with death throughout the war?

I should have been dead on December 23, 1967. As the head of research and the coordinator, my signature must be on any technology that came out, otherwise nobody would touch it. So, when we produced two launchers of 90mm, we had to test them. We had to do it to show that it could work. So, I went to Madiebo, who was the chief of army staff and requested for an artillery man. We went to Oji River to launch them. When we got there, my people said we couldn’t take chances but I told them that if you produced something without launching it, nobody would touch it.  Initially, the launcher went out very nice, but suddenly it veered off and the momentum went through the building and destroyed it. It affected me on the head and I collapsed. I was rushed to the Red Cross at Oji where I was revived and treated. It went nine inches into my head but doctor said it didn’t touch my skull. There were other instances, but that was the closest shave I had with death.

Share

from The Sun News http://ift.tt/2qmHp6J
via IFTTT