At this point Banjo decided to strike directly at Colonel Ojukwu. He conferred in the Midwest with Ifeajuana and Alale, and they worked out the final arrangements for the assassination, which was to take place coincidentally with Banjo’s presence in Enugu on 19 September, where he had been summoned to explain what he was doing in the Midwest.
None of the three seemed to realize time had run out for them. Amazingly they had broached their plan to a number of other officers and civilians, without any attempt to check first to see if those people would not remain loyal to Ojukwu. In fact most did, and several had already been to see him with details of the plot.
He took a lot of convincing, but the facts were beginning to speak for themselves. Ifeajuana and Alale were summoned separately to State House where Ojukwu coldly confronted them, then ordered their arrest. Banjo was also summoned, but arrived with a strong escort of men loyal to himself, whom he wished to bring into the grounds. He was persuaded they could stay at the gate well within call, while he went in alone but armed. He agreed. While he was waiting in the ante-room Colonel Ojukwu’s police ADC, a shrewd young Inspector, went out to the guard posse with a bottle of gin. After passing it round, he invited them to come to his house nearby and sample some more. They agreed and trooped off.
Inside State House watchers observed their departure, then swung their automatics onto Banjo. He was disarmed, then ushered in to see the Head of State. It was six hours to the time Colonel Ojukwu should have died, being close to midnight on 18 September.
It was impossible to keep the scandal quiet as the main culprits freely confessed their parts and the smaller fry were arrested. The effect on the army was traumatic and swift demoralization set in. The entire officer corps was discredited in the eyes of the soldiery, themselves fiercely loyal to Colonel Ojukwu. Although torn by his one-time friendship with Banjo, and a relation by marriage to Alale, Colonel Ojukwu was heavily pressured by his army colleagues to the view that examples had to be made to stop the rot. He gave his assent.
The four ringleaders were tried by special tribunal, sentenced to death for high treason and shot at dawn. The date was 22 September.
The exact degree of complicity or awareness of some British officials in Nigeria remains a matter of speculation in Biafra. Banjo, in his confession (backed by a file of documentary evidence taken from Banjo which Ojukwu showed the author), heavily implicated the British Deputy High Commission in Benin and the High Commission in Lagos as having been his liaison men with Awolowo and Gowon. Correspondents in Lagos later remarked they had noticed a sudden buoyancy among British officials in the middle of September, confident assurances that ‘it’ll all be over in a few days’. This was in stark contrast to the near panic of 20 August and a prophecy hardly merited by the military situation.
But after the attempted coup things did change. The damage in Biafra was enormous. By 25 September the Biafrans had withdrawn from Agbor in the Midwest, half way between the Niger River and Benin City, and by the 30th were back in a small defended perimeter around Asaba with their backs to the river. North of Enugu the demoralized infantry retreated disconsolately before the Nigerians coming south from Nsukka, and Enugu came within shelling range by the end of the month. On 6 October the Biafrans at Asaba crossed the Niger to Onitsha and blew up the newly completed £6,000,000 bridge behind them to prevent Mohammed crossing. They were highly disillusioned. Two days previously, on 4 October, the Nigerians had entered Enugu.
Abroad it was generally presumed that Biafra must collapse. Two things saved the country from disintegration; one was the personality of Colonel Ojukwu, who took a grip on the army and gave officers and men a talking to; the other was the people of the country who made it clear they did not intend to give up. As the soldiery was, and always had been, the people in uniform, the army soon got the message.
Colonel Ojukwu felt obliged to offer his resignation, which the Consultative Assembly unanimously refused. That marked the end of the Banjo episode; Biafra buckled down to getting on with the job of fighting. The long, hard slog had begun.
By this time the enormous weight of firepower imported by Nigeria, notably from Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Spain, was becoming overpowering. A further recruiting drive had enabled them to boost the Federal Army to over 40,000 men. The troops in the northern part of Biafra now formed the First Division, those across the Niger under Mohammed the Second. The First was commanded from Makurdi, miles away in the Northern Region, by Colonel Mohammed Shuwa. With Colonel Ekpo the Chief of Staff Armed Forces, and Colonel Bissalla Chief of Staff Army, four Hausas controlled the Nigerian Army. Bissalla’s predecessor, the Tiv Colonel Akahan, had been killed in a
helicopter in such odd circumstances that it was suspected a bomb had been planted.
The late autumn and winter was not a happy time for Biafra. In the north Enugu fell, while further east in the Ogoja sector the Nigerian troops had pushed down from Ogoja to Ikom, astride the main road to the neighbouring Cameroons. Then on 18 October the newly formed Third Federal Marine Commando Division, under the command of Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, made a sea-borne landing at Calabar in the southeast. With Bonny still festering and the menace of Mohammed trying to cross the Niger, that made five fronts on which the Biafrans had to fight.
Despite fierce counter-attacks the Nigerians could not be dislodged from Calabar, and with massive backing their beachhead grew steadily stronger until Adekunle burst out and forged northwards up the eastern bank of the Cross River in an attempt to link up with the First Division at Ikom. In closing the second road (out of Calabar) to the Cameroons, the Nigerians cut Biafra off from road contact with the outside world.
The single air link that now remained had been transferred to Port Harcourt and the lone B-26 at Enugu, having been riddled with bullets on the ground, had been replaced by an equally lone B-25 flown by a former Luftwaffe pilot known as Fred Herz.
Throughout the autumn foreign correspondents glibly forecast that Biafra was finished. It was a cry that had been heard several times before and has been heard many times since. The Biafrans did not worry much about it.
During October and November, 1967, Colonel Mohammed tried three times to cross the Niger by boat from Asaba and capture Onitsha.
On the first occasion, on 12 October, he got across with two battalions. One of the operational commanders at Onitsha was Colonel Joe Achuzie, a tough and ruthless Midwesterner who had spent the Second World War with the British Army and had fought in Korea. He had been working as an engineer in Port Harcourt when the war started and had enlisted in the Militia. From there he transferred to the Biafran Army. Seeing Mohammed on his way across, he decided to ambush him.
The boats landed and the men disembarked with their armoured cars. Achuzie watched them from the timber yard of the Ministry of Works as the Hausa soldiers set fire to the Onitsha Market, the largest in West Africa and with a stock once valued at £3,000,000. After this senseless piece of destruction they got into line and marched off through the abandoned town. They went about a mile when the Biafrans counter-attacked. Losing both their armoured vehicles, the Nigerians were pushed back towards the river and were finally destroyed near the landing stage.
Subsequently two more attempts were made to cross the Niger by boat, but on each occasion the craft were machine-gunned and sunk, causing heavy losses, mostly by drowning. The bulk of the losses were taken by the Yoruba soldiers in the Second Division, until their commander objected to further crossings. Leaving the Yoruba to keep watch at Asaba, Mohammed took his Hausas northwards, crossed into the Northern Region and entered Biafra from that side, intending to take Onitsha from the landward approach.
From Lagos General Gowon had predicted a finish to the war by the end of the year, but when this became impossible he made another prediction for the crushing of Biafra by 31 March 1968. By the year’s end the situation south and east of Enugu was stable, with Nigerian forces east of the town at a distance of about twenty miles, while to the south the Biafrans faced the Nigerians in the extreme outskirts of the town.
In the northeast the Federal forces possessed the whole of Ogoja Province and were facing the Biafrans across the Anyim River, a tributary of the Cross. Further south, Adekunle’s forces were half way from Calabar to Ikom, while in the deep south the Bonny sector was much as it had been five months before, several attempts at a water-borne push northwards having ended in disaster.
But with Nigeria receiving an ever-increasing supply of arms, while Biafra’s supplies remained roughly static at two planes a week, fighting became increasingly hard. The Nigerian firepower, particularly in artillery and mortars, was getting steadily more murderous, while they had also got fresh supplies of armoured cars from Britain, not only to make up losses but to expand their armoured contingents considerably. It was habitually these armoured cars that made progress, for the Biafrans had nothing that could touch them.
In late December Colonel Mohammed, with his Division now swollen to 14,000 men, set off for the 68-mile march down the main road to Onitsha. He took with him enormous supplies. A document found in the pocket of a dead major of this division later revealed that the major’s battalion alone had a reserve of 20,000 105-mm artillery shells. Just outside Enugu, close to the town of Udi, the Second Division met the Biafrans and one of the biggest running battles of the war was on.
True to Hausa tradition Mohammed massed his troops in solid phalanxes and thus they moved down the road. By mid-February he had reached Awka, still thirty miles from Onitsha. His losses had been enormous, since his path was known and the Federal soldiers did not like to move far from the main road. Throughout the war they have been highly wary of going off into the bush where their heavy equipment cannot follow them, and in massed formation they made easy targets for the Biafrans.
When he had been teaching tactics at Teshie in Ghana, Colonel Ojukwu had had in his class the young Lieutenant Murtela Mohammed. Sitting in his office in Umuahia Ojukwu now plotted and schemed to outwit his greatly superior adversary. He had to; the Biafrans, lightly armed but highly mobile, could not take Mohammed from the front. They concentrated on attacking his flanks and rear, causing high casualties. But, with scant regard for loss of life among his men, Mohammed pressed doggedly on. At Awka he missed his big chance. The Biafran forces were terribly thin in front of Mohammed, but strong at rear and sides. If he had pushed hard forwards at Awka he could have got straight to Onitsha. Colonel Ojukwu realized the danger and switched extra forces to the main axis. He needed forty-eight hours; Mohammed gave it to him. The Northerners spent three days totally destroying Awka township.
By the time they had finished the Biafrans had regrouped. Further north Achuzie with his crack 29th Battalion had been off on his own, marching 92 miles and taking from the rear the town of Adoru in the Northern Region. From there he recaptured Nsukka also from the rear, having first vetted the defences from inside. Posing as an elderly farmer anxious to cooperate with the Nigerians, he entered the town alone and was even greeted in passing by the Nigerian commander of Nsukka. Ten hours later, back in uniform, Achuzie and the 29th swept in on the undefended side.
From Nsukka he marched south toward Enugu and linked up at Ukehe, a midway-point town between Nsukka and Enugu, with Colonel Mike Ivenso who had cut across country. The episode greatly heartened Biafrans and upset the Nigerians at Enugu, for that road was their main supply route. But the demands of stopping Mohammed were too pressing. Reluctantly Ojukwu called both colonels south to help the fight going on between Awka and Abagana. Mohammed made it to Abagana, sixteen miles to Onitsha, in the first week of March.
The fighting got tougher with the arrival of the two extra battalions of Achuzie and Ivenso. Mohammed desperately called for more men, and got another 6,000 from Enugu, stripping the town bare of its garrison. Had Ojukwu had a spare battalion he could have retaken Enugu for the asking. But Mohammed pressed on to Ogidi, eight miles from Onitsha, leaving his main force at Abagana.
The spearhead of two crack Hausa battalions, the 102nd and the 105th, with Mohammed leading them, burst through to Onitsha on 25 March. Achuzie realized they could not be stopped, but decided to swing in behind them and follow into Onitsha so closely that the Nigerians would have no time to dig in. He hoped to rush them straight into the River Niger. It might have worked, for the two Federal battalions were exhausted. But on the road another Biafran battalion mistook Achuzie’s men for the Nigerians. When that had been sorted out Achuzie pressed on. At the Apostolic Church he and his men came across the 300 corpses of the congregation, who had stayed behind to pray while others fled, and who had been dragged out and executed by the Hausas. The Biafran soldiers were so stunned they refused to move on. It was their officers who had the unpleasant task of moving the bodies out of the way.