I am not an expert on maritime piracy, nor am I an expert on West Africa. So seven months ago when our Stanford team (in partnership with Six Maritime LLC) began our graduate research on the Niger Delta and the nefarious activities that plague Nigeria’s littoral regions, it was easy to become lost in shoddy media reports, confused by poor analysis and distracted by the Hollywood hype that surrounded the Maersk Alabama. I assumed that the highly publicized Somali model of maritime piracy was universal: bands of brazen youths man a skiff, motor out to sea, hijack a passing vessel, hold the crew hostage and secure a ransom payment. End of story.
But the West African experts will tell you that the Gulf of Guinea is not the Gulf of Aden. Likewise, the salty mariners who have gone toe-to-toe with armed boarding parties will tell you that not all pirates are created equal. Maritime piracy – and piracy in West Africa in particular – is the consequence of an assortment of social, economic and political dysfunctions. The depth of the problem makes it difficult to understand and its fluidity makes it problematic to solve.
So, after months of the not-so-sexy nerd work of data mining, interviews and statistical analysis, we have pared down the Gulf of Guinea’s piracy problem into seven trends that you need to know:
1. West African piracy is persistent.
Though the Gulf of Guinea has seen its share of outrageous ransom demands, the region has yet to experience the explosion of long-range attacks or prolonged hostage crises that are common to East Africa. Rather, piracy on the west side of the continent has remained relatively slow, yet incredibly persistent.
To give credit where credit is due, the region’s coalition navies have effectively disrupted nearshore maritime crime thanks to increased presence and improved coordination. However, in a perennial bid to protect its sovereignty, Nigeria has effectively barred intervention by foreign naval forces and reputable private security firms. The country’s tight regulatory control over its maritime environment has both obscured the magnitude of the problem and provided the cover necessary for piracy to endure. Underneath the security façade, collusion between criminal rackets, corrupt maritime industry employees and even naval officers are common practice. Current estimates indicate that, as a result, more than half of the piracy incidents in the gulf are never reported to bodies like the International Maritime Bureau.
For mariners operating in the gulf, the climate presents a slippery slope: poor reporting leads to inaccurate perceptions of the threat environment, which leads to inadequate security measures. This amalgamation of insecurity, collusion and misinformation qualify West Africa’s waters as the world’s most dangerous.
2. Piracy begins and ends onshore.
Whether motivated by politics or profit, the groups that hunt West Africa’s shipping lanes are agents of Nigeria’s onshore dysfunction. Following the rise of organized militancy in the Niger Delta in 2003, armed groups turned their grievances toward Nigeria’s lucrative energy market, setting their sights on the region’s offshore oil and gas infrastructure and its affiliated logistics networks. Since 2009, however, the Delta’s amnesty agreement has yielded a temporary lull in organized insurgency and a recession in militant activity in the Gulf of Guinea. The contemporary offshore violence is instead a consequence of Nigeria’s organized crime syndicates, small-time opportunists and unemployed youth militants and their perpetual search for revenue sources.
Nigeria’s malcontents change with the socioeconomic atmospherics and political landscape, but their preferred method of making a political statement or securing a big payday does not. Given the enormity of the country’s onshore troubles and the availability of maritime targets, there is no quick fix or foreseeable expiration to the region’s piracy predicament.
3. Maritime crime is transnational.
Like most criminal organizations intent on generating income, Nigeria’s pirates are rational economists that will seek opportunities to maximize profits. The result is that the Niger Delta’s seafaring malefactors don’t seem to discriminate between their home waters and those of their neighbors.
Prior to 2011, attacks were largely confined to Nigeria’s territorial waters. The limited reach was not out of courtesy for their neighbors, but rather an outcome of domestic political upheaval. The ‘stick-it-to-the-man’ approach of the Niger Delta’s militants sought to undermine the security environment for international oil companies and the Nigerian government.
The good news is that the combination of an increased naval presence, improved countermeasures, and amnesty payments has pacified (at least temporarily) some of Nigeria’s nearshore pirate activity. The bad news is that overall attacks in the region haven’t skipped a beat. Instead, criminals have demonstrated the willingness and ability to go as far west as Ivory Coast and as far south and east as Angola to find bountiful hunting grounds. When it comes to maximizing profits, Nigeria’s rational economists will go at great lengths to find vulnerable and high-payoff targets.
*To be concluded next week
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