What’s left to be said about the Civil War? This veteran tells story of how land-locked Biafran soldiers refined crude oil

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly killing 80,000 people. The bomb, dubbed Fat Man, was invented six years into the second World War in 1945 by the United States of America. While the invention of the atomic bomb has been considered an unfortunate innovation, the need to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime necessitated some novel inventions. Electronic Computers, Jet engines, radar, penicillin, and synthetic rubber were some of the inventions of World War II.

As it was in World War II, so was the Nigerian civil war, which began in 1967, where the less equipped and less trained Biafran soldiers sought various means to survive the war, leading to innovations uncommon in Africa.

Growing up in Isiala Ngwa, 20km from Umuahia, the capital of Abia State, stories of the Biafran war were recurrent and aroused emotions. As I grew older, I became intrigued by stories of inventions that occurred during the war.

From the design of Ogbunigwe called the Ojukwu Bucket, an infamous mass destruction weapon, to refining crude oil, the Biafran soldiers were nimble, converting their scarce resources into innovations that might have revolutionised the African continent if it were sustained after the war.

Another novel creation during the war was the Ojukwu Bunker, a 26.9 ft underground bomb shelter constructed within 90 days (April 1968 – July 1968). The Biafran engineers also advanced existing technologies using readily available materials. One such design was the Red Devils, an Armoured Personnel Carrier with rocket-mounted launchers and machine guns. The Uli airstrip in Anambra State was another ingenious of the civil war era. At the time, the Uli airstrip was one of the busiest in Africa and was Biafra’s connection to the world. 

Looking at the antecedence of Nigeria, where former Nigeria’s Minister of Finance Zainab Ahmed said that the country spends an average of ₦18 billion daily to subsidise the importation of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) known as Petrol, I began to wonder how 55 years ago, amidst the chaos of the civil war, Biafran soldiers, with almost no resources and advanced technology, were able to refine the oil they used to power their vehicles.

To find answers, defying the prevalent Monday’s sit-at-home order in Southeast, I took a morning bus from Isi Court in Umuahia to Umuala Nsulu to meet with Iheoma Onyemaka, a 75-year-old Biafran war veteran who was part of the Research and Production Units (RAP) that refined crude oil.

“When I joined the engineer’s corp, I became part of the team responsible for refining crude oil. There were other sections in the Engineers corp, but part of my team’s responsibility was to refine crude oil which was needed in propelling vehicles during the war.” 

Before the war, technologies involved in refining oil were deemed complex. Chinua Achebe, a literary scholar, who served in Chukwuemeka Ojukwu’s cabinet during the war, captured it in his book, There Was A Country.

He wrote: “European oil companies insisted that oil-industry technology was so complex that we would never ever in the next five hundred years be able to figure it out. We knew that wasn’t true. In fact, we learned to refine our own oil during the two-and-a-half years of the struggle because we were blockaded. We were able to demonstrate that it was possible for African people, entirely on their own, to refine oil.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, and Biafra soldiers would rise to the occasion to find ways to propel their vehicles. The need to refine crude oil came months into the war after the Nigerian forces captured Port Harcourt in present-day Rivers State on May 19, 1968, leaving the Biafrans landlocked without any access to the seaport. 

Iheoma Onyemaka was born on February 28, 1947, at Umuala Nsulu in Isiala Ngwa North Local Government of Abia State. Before the war broke out on July 6, 1967, Onyemaka was a boarding school student at Seventh Day Adventist Secondary School, Ihie, Abia State (Now Ihie High Secondary School). But the outbreak of the civil war would force the closure of all schools in Eastern Nigeria, and he was drafted into the war in 1968 at the age of 21 without any military experience as an infantry soldier. Like every other young person conscripted during the war, they were given a few weeks of basic military training before being given guns and thrust into the thick of the war.

Onyemaka recounted an experience that left him traumatised for many years and forced him to ask to be deployed from the war front. During a fierce gun battle between the Nigerian and Biafran soldiers along Okpala in present-day Imo State, he would lose his cousin, Ebenezer, who joined the army the same day with him, in a painful and disastrous way. 

“We were inside our trenches (a hole dug inside the ground) when our informant on top of a tree told us that a Nigerian soldier was coming.”

Onyemaka explained that the tactics employed by the Nigerian military at that time were to send a soldier to determine if the Biafran soldiers had laid an ambush. The military instruction given to the Biafran foot soldiers, many of whom were trained for less than two weeks, was to remain in their trenches and never to disclose their ambush positions.

“The Hausa soldier stopped at the very spot where we were hiding and started shouting so loud that we thought they had discovered our positions. We were young and untrained, so many of us took flight.”

But it was then that the Nigerian army discovered their location, and they came under heavy bombardment and gunfire that lasted almost an hour.

“Our commanding Officer instructed us to retreat to base after we’ve suffered losses. I was carrying a schoolmate who was hit in the leg while my cousin, Ebenezer, was gathering our food and water when a grenade dropped in front of him and shattered him almost into pieces.

“It was against military instructions to gather such things in such conditions, but I would not blame him entirely. We spent days without food and would have to rely on fruits in the forest and some harmless leaves. To this day, I had not told his brothers that I was there when it happened,” he told me.

Onyemaka described his cousin as a genius whose impact on the family was being felt at the time.

“At that time, Ebenezer could dissemble a motorcycle and assemble it back. He was in class five, and I was in four when the war broke out. I could only imagine what he would have become if he had survived the war.”

His cousin’s experience forced him to apply for redeployment out of the front line. It was when he was sent to the ‘rare’ as an Army Engineer Corps that he came in contact with refining crude oil. 

How Biafran engineers refined crude oil during the civil war

Oil was discovered in commercial quantity in Nigeria by Shell Darcy in 1956 at Oloibiri in present-day Ogbia Local Government Area of Bayelsa State. Production started in late 1957 and early 1958 at an average rate of 5100 barrels per day. Nigeria earned its first proceeds from oil when the first crude oil was exported in February 1958 through the first pipeline laid by Shell from the Oloibiri oilfield to Port Harcourt on the Bonny River. Hence, Nigeria discovered a liquid gold that the country would come to depend on for revenue sources heavily. Oil is also considered one of the main factors that contributed to the war, which killed an estimated three million people.

However, oil refining in Nigeria didn’t start until late 1965, after the completion of the Port Harcourt refinery.

By December 1966, production had risen to over 16 million barrels, according to data published by the Ministry of Mines and Power. The imminent danger of the war caused production by the operating oil companies to decline to 140,000 barrels per day in 1968 from 420,000 per day in 1966. One of the reasons for the drop was that Oil Companies were in a dilemma about who to pay Royalties. According to Dr AOY Raji and Dr Ts Abejide, in their research, “Oil and Biafra: An Assessment of Shell-BP’s Dilemma During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970,” the duo showed that the oil company was compelled by Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the leader of the secessionist group, to pay Royalties to the Biafran Government.

“We have been directed by Ojukwu to make payment on 1 July [1967] for reason stated in the letter… we have no option but to comply with his directions and have determined the token payment in the sum of 250,000 euros,” Shell-BP wrote to their London Office.

There were consequences for not complying with Ojukwu’s orders. One such danger was the Eni Oilmen at Kwale, Delta State, where the Biafran soldiers attacked the Okpai oilfield, killing 11 international workers (10 Italians and one Jordanian) and abducting 18 of them.

These were some of the ways the Biafran soldiers got crude oil.

One of the Biafran mini-refinery was located between Aba and Rivers State border, where Onyemaka was later posted.

“I met the refinery when I was posted as an Army Engineers Corps under the Research and Production Units (RAP).”

Typically, the method used is comparable to the one used by illegal refineries in Nigeria today. The process could be described as a manual form of fractional distillation where the different components of crude oil (gas, Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), Kerosine, Diesel, and the residuals) are extracted at different temperatures.

“We pour the crude oil into the cooking pot and heat it using crude oil as our fuel. When the crude oil is heated for a while under a controlled temperature which the older engineers in the team usually monitor, vapour will rise through the pipe connected to the cooking pot into a tank. The cooling tank is usually some metres away from the tank.”

Onyemaka told me that crude oil is poured into the refining pot called the Biafran cooking pot. The pot is a heavily built metallic tank. Fire heats it from below, fueled by crude oil, making the heat more steady and easier to control. Under high temperatures and pressure, vapours are released and rise through a pipe (or series of pipes) connected to the cooking pot and condense into another tank where it cools. 

Onyemaka explains that different components of crude oil are released at different temperatures. The first product is gas, followed by PMS (Petrol), Kerosene, and Diesel. The production lasts for nearly a day.

“Our main focus was on the petrol (PMS) used to propel the armoured cars. When Petrol starts coming out, you’ll see it. It is brighter than the petrol we have now.”

The Biafran engineers determine the components of condensing fuels manually through physical observation. It can take nearly three hours for the extraction of petrol to be completed.

After the war, Onyemaka studied political science at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and worked as an administrator in different Local Government councils in Abia State before he retired in 2009.

While Onyemaka believes that the war was inevitable following the two coups in 1966 and the pogrom, he feels that corruption is primarily the reason why Nigeria has failed to refine its oils.

“We were able to refine crude oil in thick forest with little prior knowledge of the process. If not for corruption and mismanagement, Nigeria would have tens of modular refineries in the oil-producing states, exporting refined oil all over Africa and even Asia.”

“As you can see, the same mistakes we made that caused the war is being made now. There is still corruption, and political leanings are largely toward tribal lines.” 

Although the newly built Dangote Refinery is expected to change Nigeria’s over dependence in imported petroleum products, 52 years after the war, Nigeria still imports about 1.3 million tons of petrol per month.

• First published in November 2022.