By Oluyinka Onigbinde
Maiguwa also questioned the extent to which the assets deployed under Nigeria’s Deep Blue Project could alone be credited for the reduction in piracy.
He noted that the security architecture experienced operational and coordination challenges, including limitations involving some of the assets deployed for maritime surveillance and intervention.
According to him, some assets were unavailable for extended periods, while institutional coordination and administrative arrangements also took considerable time to mature.
He acknowledged that there had been interventions by various security actors and local stakeholders, including interventions in the Niger Delta, but argued that the overall picture of what brought piracy under control remained inadequately documented.
His concern, he said, was that Nigeria could be celebrating the absence of reported piracy without sufficiently understanding the factors that produced the decline.
He drew attention to another category of maritime criminals who, according to him, operated differently from traditional pirates.
While conventional piracy could involve hijacking vessels and stealing cargo, he said some criminal groups had focused on abducting crew members and taking them into creeks for ransom.
He also raised concerns about a different category of attacks in which vessels could allegedly disappear temporarily and later reappear without their cargo, saying that the identity and operating methods of those behind such incidents had not been sufficiently established.
Maiguwa stressed that no criminal group could attack a ship without first gaining access to the maritime domain.
“These guys do not come from the bottom of the sea. They come to the shore,” he said.
He therefore argued that the critical question for Nigeria should be whether its maritime domain is sufficiently monitored and controlled to make unauthorised access to vessels extremely difficult.
According to him, unless Nigeria can demonstrate such capability to the international community, simply publishing statistics showing a decline in piracy may not be sufficient to convince the London insurance market that the additional risk has disappeared.
One of the biggest weaknesses, he said, was the absence of a comprehensive national maritime security database capable of capturing incidents that do not necessarily make it into official Nigerian crime statistics.
Maiguwa said security and shipping companies often possess information about incidents that never become public because of commercial, insurance or reputational considerations.
He said some incidents involving stowaways, deaths at sea and unauthorised access to vessels could be reported privately to shipowners, security managers or international insurance and security networks without being formally reported to Nigerian authorities.
“If we don’t know it, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” he said.
According to him, the international maritime community may therefore have access to a much wider body of security information than is contained in Nigeria’s official statistics.
He said this was one of the reasons he had decided to strengthen MASPAN’s own information-gathering capacity and develop a more robust maritime security database.
“Today, the first meeting I had is, I have just decided that I’m going to invest and build the data myself,” he said.
“I want to build a robust maritime data.”
He argued that credible and comprehensive data would enable Nigeria to identify patterns, understand emerging threats and present a stronger case to international insurers and other stakeholders.
Maiguwa said one of the most disturbing indicators was the frequency of stowaway incidents, claiming that there was virtually a stowaway case every week out of Lagos ports, although many of such incidents might not become publicly known.
“There is a stowaway case every week out of Lagos port. Every goddamn week,” he said.
For him, a stowaway incident is more than an immigration or port security problem; it is an indication that an unauthorised person was able to penetrate the port environment and gain access to a vessel.
He similarly cited drug trafficking as another indicator of vulnerabilities in the maritime security chain.
According to him, there have been instances where international agencies provided information about suspected narcotics being carried aboard vessels, only for the drugs to be missing by the time Nigerian authorities searched the ship.
He said such situations raised the possibility that unauthorised individuals had gained access to vessels within the Nigerian maritime environment.
“These are indicators,” he said.
Maiguwa argued that the challenge confronting Nigeria was therefore broader than piracy.
He said the international insurance community wanted reassurance that a vessel entering Nigerian waters could not easily be accessed by criminal networks, whether for piracy, kidnapping, trafficking, theft or other forms of maritime crime.
This, he said, was why Nigeria needed to develop what he described as a comprehensive maritime security framework capable of giving international stakeholders confidence.
“Let us build a framework that works and gets the international community to understand this framework and how it works to get that comfort,” he said.
“Unless we do that, war risk is not going anywhere. We can publish anything as much as we want.”
He pointed to Kenya as an example of a country that had been able to address its risk perception sufficiently to no longer face the same level of additional war risk insurance burden.
According to him, Nigeria needed to examine what other countries had done to provide international shipping and insurance stakeholders with confidence in their maritime security systems.
He also cited the United States’ response to the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code as an example of how maritime security could be integrated into a broader national framework.
Maiguwa argued that the ISPS Code alone was not sufficient because it primarily addresses security requirements for port facilities and ships engaged in international trade, while the wider maritime domain extends beyond individual port facilities.
He said the United States subsequently strengthened its national maritime security architecture through the Maritime Transportation Security Act, creating a more comprehensive system capable of accounting for access to ports and maritime facilities.
According to him, Nigeria needs to develop a similar philosophy, not necessarily by copying the United States, but by creating an integrated system capable of accounting for people, vessels and movements across the maritime domain.
He questioned the effectiveness of Nigeria’s existing port access control arrangements, arguing that different agencies operate different identification and access systems without sufficient central integration.
Maiguwa said the weakness was particularly concerning because an individual who gains unauthorised access to the waterfront or coastal environment could potentially gain access to vessels.
He argued that maritime security should not stop at the port gate but must extend across the coastal and inland waters that provide access to ships.
Another major vulnerability, according to him, is the inadequate identification and tracking of boats operating within Nigeria’s waters.
He said Nigeria should have a comprehensive system distinguishing vessels designed for sea-going operations from those intended for inland waterways and anchorage areas.
He referred to the use of Class A and Class B Automatic Identification System (AIS) categories in maritime regulation, arguing that Nigeria needed stronger controls over which types of boats were permitted to operate in different parts of the maritime domain.
“Do we have that in Nigeria? If you have a boat, you can go and get lost in Nigeria. Nobody cares,” he said.
He also criticised what he described as inadequate accountability in boat construction and registration, saying some boats could be built without sufficient identification numbers, tracking mechanisms or clear records of their construction and ownership.
