While almost all the attention on and, hence, resources for combating piracy in African waters have of late been focused almost exclusively on the waters off the Somali coastline (see my most recent report on the “Return of the Somali Pirates”), a bloody attack last week is a reminder that the Gulf of Guinea on the opposite side of Africa can be equally dangerous – if not more so – even if it does not grab headlines with spectacular heists like this week’s capture of the Greek supertanker MV Maran Centaurus as it was transporting more than two million barrels of oil destined for the United States.
On November 24th, pirates in a speed boat approached the German-owned, Liberian-flagged oil tanker MT Cancale Star some 18 nautical miles off the coast of the West African country of Benin in the eponymous bight. The 230-meter vessel was weighed down with some 500,000 barrels of diesel bound for the Beninois port of Cotonou. Storming on board the vessel, they killed the Ukrainian first officer and wounded four other seamen before putting a gun to the head of one of the crew members and forcing the captain to open the safe, which they then emptied. With the exception of one pirate who was overpowered by the crew, all the marauders managed to escape before naval forces could respond to the tanker’s distress signal. It was subsequently learned that the pirates came from the Nigerian town of Badagry, on the border with Benin, 70 kilometers west of Lagos, Nigeria. The attack was the first such incident recorded for Benin, a poor, but peaceful, democracy, and represented a new expansion of the reach of Nigerian pirates.
While piracy is not new to the area – in one infamous episode, in 1979, as a Danish cargo ship, the MV Lindinga Ivory, was violently attacked three nautical miles outside the port of Lagos, the master was killed and thrown overboard, all 14 crew members were wounded, and the cargo was looted – its ubiquity is. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), during the first three quarters of this year, the waters off Nigeria ranked as the second most dangerous in the world in terms of attacks, with 20 reported. As a whole, 32 incidents were reported for West Africa during that period.
However, as the head of the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners (INTERTANKO) cautioned earlier this year in a letter to the secretary-general of the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO), “the number of officially reported incidents may be doubled to give a more realistic picture of what is happening in this area.” Managing Director Peter Swift also wrote that his industry was “very seriously concerned by the ongoing violent attacks in the Gulf of Guinea against innocent merchant ships by armed pirates operating out a network of more than 3,000 creeks in Nigeria alone, and also by the apparent inability of the national and regional governments to protect shipping against these attacks,” which he noted are “well planned and coordinated and frequently violent” and carried out by pirates who are “usually heavily armed.”
While “political” attacks since 2006 by militants, both at sea and in the Niger Delta, aimed at Nigeria’s hydrocarbon sector have received considerable attention (see my report last year on “Global Ripples from the Niger Delta”), especially since their net effect has been to cut the country’s oil exports by nearly one-third from 2.2 million barrels per day to about 1.6 million or so today (although production has recently bounced back somewhat in the tenuous peace following an amnesty offered to militants earlier this fall), the incidents of piracy for purely – or, at least, predominantly – criminal motives are a relatively underappreciated phenomenon. Of course distinguishing the motives of many of the attackers can be a singularly unrewarding exercise. While there is no denying the legitimacy of many of the grievances cited by various groups in justifying their assaults, there are also unmistakable signs that it is organized criminality, rather than political activism, at work, as evidenced by some of the reported attacks on international shipping so far this year:
• On January 4th, gunmen in speedboats seized control of the French-owned fast supply intervention vessel MV Bourbon Leda as it sailed passed Nigeria’s Bonny Island crude export terminal en route to Royal Dutch Shell’s Bonga offshore field. The crew of five Nigerians, two Ghanaians, one Cameroonian, and one Indonesian was held hostage for several days before being released in exchange for the payment of an undisclosed sum.
• On January 15th, the Marshall Islands-flagged chemical tanker MT Samho Cordelia was boarded after dusk by ten armed men while at anchor off Lagos. The captain was attacked before the assailants made off with cash and other valuables.
• Two days later, on January 17th, the Bahamas-registered crude oil tanker MT Front Chief was attacked by marauders in speed boats, armed with automatic weapons and explosives, while the vessel was berthed at the Bonny Island terminal, where it was taking on a load. Fortunately, the grenades thrown by the attackers missed; unfortunately, the captain of the line tug used by the tanker was killed.
• Two days after that, on January 19th, the German cargo ship MV MOL Splendor, was boarded while anchored at Tema, Ghana. The robbers broke into a container and made off with the contents.
• On February 14th, the Romanian-owned, Liberian-flagged floating storage and offloading unit (FPSO) Histria Tiger was boarded by more than a dozen masked pirates armed with automatic weapons as it lay anchored off Lagos. They took the boatswain hostage and forced him to lead them to the bridge where they opened fire, destroying the ship’s communication system. They then proceeded to rob the vessel and its crew.
• Three days later, on February 17th, seaborne gunmen attacked Equatorial Guinea’s capital of Malabo, shooting their way as far as the presidential palace, before they were repelled by security forces.
• A month later, on March 11th, in the same port, another heavily armed gang boarded the Singapore-flagged chemical tanker MT Emirates Swan. The captain and a seaman were serious injured in the assault.
• On April 19th, while berthed in Lagos, the Liberian-flagged bulk carrier MV Aristeas P was boarded by armed men from two speed boats, who ransacked the ship’s stores.
• The next day, the Turkish-owned, Marshall Islands-flagged chemical tanker MT Aleyna Mercan was attacked by armed pirates some 50 nautical miles off the Nigerian coast where the boat was making a delivery to the French oil company Total. After robbing the vessel and its crew, the attackers took the captain and an engineer hostage as they escaped; the two were later released.
• On May 21st, the German-owned, St. Vincent and Grenadines-registered cargo ship MV Reval was boarded as it was sailing off the Nigerian coast. The armed attackers broke down the cabin doors of officers and crew, robbing them as well as the ship’s safe, before making their escape.
• On June 6th, crew of the Panamanian-flagged bulk carrier MV Nord Express drove off a group of armed robbers who were in the process of looting the ship’s stores while it lay at anchor off the port of Takoradi, Ghana.
• Three days later, on June 9th, the British tanker MV Anuket Ivory was boarded in the early morning hours as it rode at anchor off Douala, Cameroon. The armed attackers disabled the communications equipment and robbed the vessel before escaping.
• About an hour later, on the same day, 16 armed men boarded and robbed the Ukrainian-owned, Panamanian-flagged cargo ship MV Sevastopolskaya Bukhta as it was likewise at anchor off Douala.
• The next day, June 10th, the brand-new Panamanian-registered bulk carrier MV Tennei Maru was boarded and robbed by heavily armed robbers as it was anchored off the Nigerian coast.
• On June 27th, the Turkish-flagged bulk carrier MV Duden was attacked by pirates off Lagos. Three crew members were wounded by fire from the marauders.
• On June 29th, the Liberian-flagged bulk carrier MV Pearl River was robbed by armed men while anchored off Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
On July 12th, likewise off Abidjan, the German-owned, Liberian-flagged tanker MT Abram Schulte was robbed by armed men.
• A month later, on August 3rd, five crew members were kidnapped from the Lithuanian refrigerated cargo ship MV Saturnas as it was anchored off Nigeria.
• On August 27th, robbers boarded the Dutch chemical tanker MT Venezia D as it was berthed in Lagos and, threatening the duty watchman with a gun, managed to escape with part of the cargo.
• On September 6th, in Koki, Nigeria, more than fifty armed assailants stormed the Turkish-owned, Maltese-flagged tanker MT Erria Anne. As the crew took shelter, the robbers made off with the ship’s stores.
• The next day, September 7th, nine heavily-armed pirates in speed boat boarded and hijacked the St. Vincent and Grenadines-registered tug boat Jascon 40 was sailing near Nigeria’s Bonny River.
• On September 20th, half a dozen armed pirates boarded the Antigua and Barbuda-registered refrigerated cargo ship MV Nova Galicia as it was steaming off the Bonny River.
• On October 10th, Cameroonian military forces repel an attack on the FV Rose Three, owned by Atlantic Shrimper Limited, Nigeria’s largest fisheries company, as the boat was anchored off the Bakassi Peninsula, which Nigeria recently yielded its neighbor. Four attackers were killed, while three others were injured.
While most analysis of this maritime predations have focused on the costs which they impose on the global economy as a whole in terms of delays in ports and increases in insurance rates, costs which are passed on to consumers, less attention is paid to their effect on the very countries in the region whose weakness gave rise to the piracy in the first place. In fact, such reports of Gulf of Guinea piracy as make it into Western media largely ignores the fact that the majority of attacks are carried out against local vessels and mariners, to say nothing of the overwhelming cost burden from these assaults being borne by the people of the subregion. In Nigeria, for example, piracy and other outlaw behavior have not only negatively impacted the oil industry, but local fisheries and regional trade as well.
By most estimates, until recently fishing constituted Nigeria’s second-most significant non-hydrocarbon export industry after cocoa. Yet the sector has been devastated by piracy and other violence. The country’s Maritime Security Task Force on Acts of Illegality in Nigerian Waters (IAMSTAF) reported last December that Nigerian fishing boats suffered no fewer than 293 attacks between 2003 and 2008. The assaults ranged from demands for “protection” money from fishermen and the theft of catches to the wholesale theft of fishing boats and killing of their crews. The situation has deteriorated so much that, at one point last year, The Vanguard, the major newspapers in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, screamed “FISH SCARCITY LOOMS!” as it reported that some 170 fishing trawlers were idled because their owners were afraid to put out to sea, threatening some 50,000 jobs. According to the paper’s editors, Nigeria is losing some $600 million in export revenues annually from piracy threats to the fishing industry alone. It goes without saying that, in addition to losses in export earnings, the scarcity imposed has driven up the cost of seafood, a major source of protein for coastal populations, by as much as fivefold in some areas, thus worsening the misery of the most vulnerable.
The attacks on shipping have also driven up shipping costs, not just for Nigeria, but for most of its neighbors in the West African subregion, as the higher insurance premiums are factored in and, ultimately, passed on to consumers. This results in increased prices for goods and services and, as a result, dampens trade as fewer people are able to afford them at the new inflated levels. Consequently, regional trade and integration which are critical for economic development is further retarded. In short, piracy and other criminal activities on the waters are not only the result of social, economic, and political marginalization, but also a cause of the same.
Like its counterpart off the Somali coast, maritime criminality off the littorals of West Africa is the result of opportunity and incentive. Until such time as the states of the region acquire the capacity to confront this disorder, it will not only continue, but likely increase. For this reason, initiatives like the Africa Partnership Station (APS), led by the U.S. Navy under the aegis of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and aimed at strengthening local capabilities through progressively more robust engagements, are extremely important (see my report last year on “Engaging Maritime Africa”). While these efforts have already borne some fruit, much more remains to be done—not least of which is focusing adequate attention and resources on an area whose strategic importance grows each day.
J. Peter Pham PhD is Senior Fellow and Director of the Africa Project at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in New York City. He also hold academic appointments as Associate Professor of Justice Studies, Political Science, and African Studies at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and non-resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. He currently serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and writes for FamilySecurityMatters.org.
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