Enugu in early August already carried the particular tension of a capital at war—checkpoints going up overnight, radios crackling with half-confirmed rumours, the air thick with the smell of diesel and impending consequence. Reports of the capture of Bonny and its oil terminals weren’t shared with the citizens, but there was an edginess in the air, mingling with songs of optimistic patriotism. It was into this city, on the 6th, that Wole Soyinka came, having slipped out of the West with no story that would survive scrutiny. He was not there to admire the capital’s nerve. He didn’t come to persuade Ojukwu not to secede, though he would prefer the referendum route. He made a point to see his friend, Christopher Okigbo, unknown to both of them, for the last time. Perhaps, he shared a cigar, tea, or coffee with Ojukwu over whatever chat masked his true mission to Enugu. There was one consequential conversation to have, and the man waiting for him was Victor Banjo.
They were both patriotic intellectual vanguardist of University College Ibadan circuit, shaped by the same lofty, fervent desire for liberty. And here they were, on the eve of an invasion the world did not yet know was coming, quietly deciding to turn that invasion into something else entirely.
Banjo would have laid it out with a soldier’s economy. In three days he would move into the Midwest—that much was already fixed, already loaded into the machinery of the war. But the Midwest was never the point. It was merely a leverage. His course mate, David Ejoor was the governor of the youngest and least armed region. Beyond it lay the West, Awolowo’s uneasy territory, full of men who despised Gowon’s Northern-dominated federal government but recoiled just as violently from Biafran tanks in their streets. It was in that narrow crack between two fears that Banjo meant to work—and Soyinka’s task was to go back and prise open a corridor through the Garrison Commander, Olusegun Obasanjo. When the moment came, this assembled weight would move on Lagos and Enugu together, and Gowon and Ojukwu would both be swept from the board, replaced by something Soyinka and his fellow travellers had been imagining, in one form or another, for years.
Soyinka left Enugu on the 7th carrying that plan inside him like something ready to detonate, and by the 8th he was back in Ibadan, moving through his old college city with the strange, hunted alertness of a man who has just agreed to become a traitor to at least one side. On the 9th, exactly as promised, Banjo’s forces took the Midwest, and the whole conspiracy stopped being a conversation and became a living thing, with a few surprises. He had no idea, Ojukwu had asked people under his command to unalive David Ejoor behind his back. He went on the radio to preach liberation, but Ojukwu imposed Okokwo on the citizens. His sermon on radio wasn’t adding up. Time was ticking. Soyinka kept pace with it. On the 11th he met Olusegun Obasanjo in Ibadan, passing along Banjo’s message—the shape of the rendezvous, the terms of the mutiny, whatever precise coordinates a plot like this needs to survive its own infancy.
It survived two more days. On the 13th of August, Soyinka was arrested, and the solitary confinement that followed would hold him for the rest of the war—the one man capable of animating the Western half of the plan, taken off the board just as it needed him most. From his own point of view, Obasanjo was a calculating man.
What was left, after that, was Banjo sitting at Ore with an invasion that had lost its luckier half. The weeks that followed have gone down in the history as hesitation, as a commander’s failure of nerve at the one moment nerve mattered most. But it was not hesitation. It was a man listening for a signal that was never going to come, because the messenger was already in a federal cell, and the West was happy to have Awolowo managing the purse of the war.
Meanwhile in Enugu, Ojukwu’s own intelligence was bringing him a colder story—that his commander had been meeting those dreaded intellectuals, courting Third Force sympathisers, perhaps building something with Biafran soldiers that had nothing to do with Biafra’s military objectives at all. Suspicion, once planted, does not need much silence to grow into certainty.
On the 20th of September, federal troops behind the most reckless commander finally broke the line at Ore, and Banjo was recalled to Enugu that same day and arrested. Two days later, on the 22nd, he was executed. What had begun as a few men whispering in a safe space in Enugu in early August ended, in that same city—on a stake at an execution ground.
With Soyinka writing his exculpatory memoir in Kaduna, and his like minds lying in unmarked graves, the radical network of brilliant minds had run out of time. What broke the hearts of the Survivors the most was the death in battle of their finest poet—Christopher Okigbo.
Whoever is romancing the notion that the third force had a chance in hell of achieving peace probably thinks the Mid-West invasion was the beginning of the civil war.
But it was actually a desperate response to a landmark federal military success on July 25, 1967. The Bonny Landing is the most significant turning point of the avoidable war. Nine war ships were deployed in the first fully orchestrated amphibious assault ever undertaken by an independent African nation, which set the stage for the naval and economic encirclement of Biafra. It put an stop to Shell BP’s temptation to pay royalty to Enugu.
When Captain Soroh, assisted by James Rowe, helped Benjamin Adekunle to put the boots of his marine force on the beach of Bonny, the action transferred £150 million assets under the control of Gowon, and convinced Britain that they could bank on the federal government of Nigeria. It also sealed the can on Biafra.
This is why the troops under Banjo’s command formed three prongs—one heading to Agenebode with access to a strategic part of the seaward River Niger; one heading to Warri and Escravos, grabbing Ughelli; and the arrow head surging towards Lagos, with Benin as its centre of gravity.
At this point, Biafra had a clear advantage in the air and was terrifying targets in Kaduna and Apapa. Frustrated by the British, stalling, waiting to be sure on which horse to place their bet, Gowon had turned to Russia for fighter jets.
In effect, the war these militant intellectuals were trying to wrest from the furnace was a war in full swing.
The reality on the ground is why I make bold to say that Obasanjo saved the West from becoming the main theatre of war. And, the third force was an exercise in recklessly dangerous naivety.
