How many people?
There are 1,2,3,4,5.
In October 2020,
a chemical tanker was boarded by pirates
in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of West Africa.
As the pirates made their way onto the deck,
the crew from the Philippines
scrambled to the vessel’s safety room.
Cramped inside,
the crew agonized as the pirates tried to force their way in.
After a 24 hour ordeal, the pirates abandoned the ship.
Many haven’t been as lucky.
In January 2021,
heavily armed pirates successfully broke into a Turkish vessel.
One seafarer was killed.
Fifteen others were kidnapped and taken to the Niger Delta
before being released for an undisclosed ransom.
Today, piracy in West Africa is on the rise.
Since 2020, 180 seafarers have been kidnapped
as they passed through what’s become known as “pirate alley.”
It’s getting worse because there is hardly any week now
that you don’t get to hear about pirate attacks.
Pirate attack, pirate attack.
Ninety-seven percent of recent kidnappings at sea
occurred in the Gulf of Guinea,
making this region that stretches from Gabon to Liberia
the piracy hotspot of the world.
Pirates attacked an oil supply vessel,
taking the captain and chief engineer hostage.
So why have these waters become a magnet for maritime crime?
And why are countries struggling to keep pirates at bay?
This is the System Error
that has led to piracy thriving off the coast of West Africa.
[System Error]
This is our 27th day in captivity.
Our kidnappers are losing patience.
They are concerned that there has been no response at all
to their demands for money.
In 2009, a British couple sailing from the Seychelles to Tanzania
were abducted by Somali pirates.
At the time, Somalia was the epicenter of maritime piracy.
Somali pirates have been attacking ships
in the seas off their coast for years.
Pirates are still holding close to 500 hostages
and more than 20 ships.
Pirates would board vessels, drop anchor,
and ask for ransom money.
The threats provoked a response not seen since World War II,
when all five permanent members of the UN Security Council
agreed to deploy armed forces on the Somali coast.
The only viable long-term solution to the Somali pirate ship problem
is to restore law and order in Somalia,
including in its waters.
Since then, piracy on the east coast of Africa has been in sharp decline.
But on the continent’s opposite coast,
a new band of pirates have emerged.
The pirates, armed with AK-47s and powerful speedboats
are from the Niger Delta.
The pirates are armed with sophisticated weapons,
some of which the security operatives do not have.
They move on the waterways,
and basically, they see their targets and they attack.
They take the people they want to take hostage,
and then zoom into thin air.
Once captured at sea,
those kidnapped are taken to swampy mangrove forests.
When they put you on the phone with your people,
they will threaten that if you do not make the money they demand available,
you are going to be killed.
Hostages are held until ransoms,
which have been known to reach millions of dollars, are paid up.
The story of how these gangs
became the most dangerous threat to maritime trade
begins over 60 years ago,
when oil was first discovered by Shell-BP in Nigeria.
Shell was the first to export oil from Nigeria in 1958.
Shell is Nigeria’s oldest private sector energy company
and has a long-term commitment to the country and its people.
While multinational companies and the government
have made billions of dollars over the years,
that success has come at great cost to the local population.
Shell’s facility polluted it,
which causes all the fish to die.
Since production started,
tens of millions of barrels of oil have been spilled in the Niger Delta,
destroying the livelihoods of the local farmers and fishermen.
If you look at the ground,
you can see that all this is crude oil.
Look at it. It entered into the ground.
It was soaked up all over.
With poverty on the rise
and multinational oil companies getting richer,
Robin Hood-like groups in the Niger Delta organized.
We are sick and tired of this s**t.
This struggle is not about me.
It’s all about the Niger Delta people.
If this continues,
what do you expect from my son,
what do you expect from my child?
These militants sabotaged pipelines and stole oil from cargo ships
to reclaim what they felt was rightfully theirs.
We are here to stop the operation
and blow up the pipelines.
We are not out there to kill humans.
But in 2016, as the price of crude oil plummeted,
a growing number began kidnapping foreign crew members for ransom.
Today, these pirate groups are not short on new recruits.
Poverty in the Niger Delta is persistent.
We have very many people
that are finding it difficult to survive and live by the sea.
We have very many of them.
To make matters worse, foreign fishing vessels
from the likes of China and the European Union
are plundering the seas off West Africa.
As with oil, the demand for the region’s fish is high.
But locals, once again, aren’t seeing any of the profits.
Nobody would want to move out of his or her comfort zone
to go on the river and become pirates,
except if the person is driven by hunger.
Piracy in the region
is thought to be far worse than official numbers suggest.
The reports we are having about pirate activities
in parts of the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Guinea
is even less than what is happening.
Vessels are often reluctant to call local authorities for help
because they themselves are breaking the law.
Because the sea’s an open space,
it can also be exploited by criminal elements.
As well as piracy,
crimes such as illegal fishing and summary executions can take place
with little risk of prosecution.
For many countries, governing or policing their maritime space
is a major challenge.
The Gulf of Guinea, like many other waters across the world,
is confronted with a number of transnational crimes.
Some vessels have been taking matters into their own hands.
Foreign trawlers coming into the Gulf of Guinea for fishing,
sometimes they attack the local fishermen
because when they spot them around the ocean,
they fear that they are pirates, and they attack them.
I have phone calls from communities that they have been attacked
by some of these boats that come from outside.
I get phone calls about their situation,
and they call me to come and help.
The problem is that policing one’s seas is very costly.
You are talking about enormous resources that are needed,
both in terms of surface ships that must be at sea
and other surveillance equipments that are needed.
Piracy makes that demand even more difficult
because you are talking about criminal elements
that enjoy a high level of mobility,
and you are trying to trace and track them down,
fix them, and arrest them,
and that is a major difficulty.
The international community does have the military resources
and it is keen to deploy these in the Gulf of Guinea.
[A New EU Maritime Security Mechanism]
[Will Seek to Curb Piracy and Organised Crime]
[In Africa’s Gulf of Guinea]
But they can’t do what they did in East Africa.
It’s absolutely important to see cases are different.
If you want to replicate something that worked in Somalia,
you’re bound to fail
without understanding that the contest is completely different.
Unlike Somalia, West African nations aren’t failed states
and don’t wish to have their sovereignty undermined.
But they are keen to see the issue go away.
For a region that is already struggling
in terms of its economy’s survivability,
increase in freight rates and increase in insurance
translates into higher costs of doing business
and higher cost of buying ordinary goods and services
that the public needs.
So this has also got significant implications for the region.
But these countries are not well-prepared to tackle piracy.
Africa’s colonial legacy
has meant that few countries have developed their own maritime forces.
Colonial rulers used local populations for their armies,
but their own navies for the seas.
None of the new colonies actually feared an attack by the sea
from the neighbors.
Securing the regime was focused on the land rather than the sea.
And because of that, you have relatively few sizable navies
on the continent.
Nigeria has recently taken bold steps to get rid of its piracy problem.
But as pirates move across sea borders,
a joined-up approach is crucial.
While the 25 countries along the Gulf of Guinea have been teaming up,
finding a way forward takes time.
Depending on who you ask,
they might say that they’ve been slow in the way they are responding.
But I can tell you,
as someone that’s very familiar in terms of the research that I do
and also engagement with
the people that actually implement some of those policies,
the policies that they're doing the best they can.
A military solution on its own may not solve the problem.
In Somalia, the international crackdown on piracy
led to offenders switching to other criminal enterprises.
Yes, there’s a need for military response,
but centering this,
this is absolutely the wrong way to go
because what you end up doing or might end up doing
is actually that, yes, you fight piracy at sea,
but then you redirect the crime to something else.
And when you talk about security,
you should not only be talking about the gun boat security,
you shouldn’t just be talking about the helicopter security.
You should be talking about human security as well,
talking about food security, talking about social security,
these are the kind of security that should be put in place.
Securing a livelihood for pirates
is more likely to address the problem,
benefiting both them and their victims.
I recommend the carrot and stick approach.
While you are supporting the security architecture,
you are also using the carrot approach
to provide incentives and alternatives
for the youths who are involved in this.
I was able to penetrate some of those pirate gangs
and talk to them,
and a lot of them are willing to stop if they have an alternative.