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23 March 2011
By Nnimmo Bassey
The recent public presentation of the book, ‘The Ogbunigwe Fame' by Felix Oragwu brought up memories of the technological innovations that kept the Biafran dream alive from 1967 to 1970.
The recent public presentation of the book, ‘The Ogbunigwe Fame' by Felix Oragwu brought up memories of the technological innovations that kept the Biafran dream alive from 1967 to 1970.
During the vicious civil war, Biafra was blockaded and starved of access to resources ranging from domestic goods to industrial products. Necessity thrust upon Biafra the need to innovate and to create. It was in this mode that the nascent nation built and ran crude oil refineries and also produced missiles or bombs, then known as ‘ogbunigwe' or ‘Ojukwu buckets'. These efforts were driven by the inescapable urge for survival.
In the past few years, there has been an emergence of what many term ‘bush refineries' in the oil fields of the Niger Delta. These are spots in the swamps and creeks where local people, mostly youth, produce petroleum products using crude oil obtained from either already leaking pipelines or from spots broken into by crude oil thieves.
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