In late July, pirates stormed an Italian oil tanker, startling the 23 crew members
In late July, pirates stormed an Italian oil tanker, startling the 23 crew members guiding the ship toward its African port. But this was not another attack off the coast of Somalia, whose pirates have for years been the scourge of shipping lanes off its coast. The men who seized the Anema e Core work thousands of miles to the west, in the Gulf of Guinea.
In the past eight months, acts of piracy have spiked in the waters off West Africa, says John Drake, a senior consultant at the London-based security firm AKE. The wave of violence seems partly inspired by the Somali pirates and partly a result of the mixed blessings that come, countries in the region are finding out, with discovering vast oil reserves.
Piracy here is a combination of brazen criminality and vigilante redressing of economic imbalance. West Africa’s waters are an oil-soaked frontier for downtrodden young men hailing from the lawless Niger Delta, the area of Nigeria that perhaps best exemplifies the widening gap between oil wealth and poverty. Many of the rebels are from fishing communities and need nothing but their small vessels and guns in a raid. Firearms are widely available around West Africa, particularly in the Delta.
The violence perpetuated against those sailing through the West’s shipping channels is “much, much higher than in any other part of the world. The robbers and militants are abusing them quite a bit,” says Cyrus Mody, manager of the London-based International Maritime Bureau, which monitors global pirate activity. “It’s much higher than in East Africa or other areas where we see this crime being committed.”
In the past two years, as has happened in Somalia, entire crews have been shot and killed, their gun-wielding assailants sneaking up on them in small fishing skiffs. Some sailors have been tied up, beaten with rifle butts and whipped with electrical cables. Last year, Mody says, pirates who had seized a ship panicked and shot crew members at random after an officer sounded an emergency alarm. Now the region is sounding its own.
Since January, the International Maritime Bureau has seen a sharp rise in the number of recorded pirate attacks in the Gulf of Guinea, a stretch of ocean that runs along the coastline of 12 countries, from Ghana to Angola. While in 2010 there were no acts of piracy off the coast of Benin, Sixteen attacks have taken place in its waters this year, including the hijack of the Anema e Core, whose crew escaped unharmed after intervention from Benin’s navy. There have been six assaults off the coast of Nigeria, and three near the coast of West Africa’s most stable country, Ghana. Mody says the number of attacks is underreported.
The sudden rise in West African piracy has prompted concerns that weak maritime security in the area could severely affect global oil, metal and agricultural markets, says Jonathan Wood, a security expert at London-based Control Risks, an international consultancy that advises businesses on operating in hazardous environments. Two of Africa’s top producers, Nigeria and Angola, are nestled in the Gulf, and the U.S. is aiming to import 25% of its oil through West African shipping lanes by 2015. Recently London’s Lloyd’s Marketing Association placed Nigeria and Benin in the same risk category as Somalia.
Angry Niger Delta rebels have been attacking drilling platforms and refineries, seizing boats and kidnapping oil executives for years in their conflict with the government and, by extension, the Western oil companies who they feel have pillaged their land. “It’s a murky set of motives, whether to generate political impact or generate ransom,” Drake says. “The oil sector is an attractive sector because attacks against it can generate shock waves around the international community – everyone’s watching it, particularly Nigeria. But militants also have the perception that oil companies have more money than other private companies, so they have more to invest in the local communities or to pay ransoms.”
Delta activists have railed against oil companies’ operating in the region for decades, reacting to hazardous pollution and spills that have rendered entire villages uninhabitable. In August, oil giant Shell admitted to a British court that it was responsible for two spills in the Delta town of Bodo. It was a rare instance of David defeating Goliath – in taking action, Delta villagers face too many financial constraints and the notoriously corrupt Nigerian legal system. Residents of the town of Goi are currently suing Shell in the Hague, where the company has its headquarters, for what they say is negligence that caused a major pipeline to burst near the village in 2004.
But it’s the armed attacks, not the legal ones, that have grabbed the attention of regional governments. On Aug. 18, Oyewole Olubenga Leke, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s senior special assistant on maritime services, told Reuters that the coastal states were discussing a joint patrol force that he hoped would be “a real force in the subregion to combat piracy.” But with the Gulf countries boasting little manpower and equipment to secure a coastal perimeter that spans 12 countries, it may be too little, too late.
International assistance could be crucial to fighting the scourge. “Countries in West Africa are nowhere close to Somalia, which is a completely failed state with no governance,” Wood says. “But there’s a question about the capacity of the coast guard and naval forces. There are capacity limitations for long-distance patrolling and area surveillance.” The U.S. has provided training to the navies of Nigeria and Cameroon, which has “had a significant impact on criminal activity off those waters,” Wood says.
The pirates’ increasing boldness is partly a case of follow the leader. “They’re being inspired by the earnings of pirates elsewhere in the world,” Drake says. But pirates in the oil-soaked West in some ways have it easier than their Somali counterparts: the region is strewn with soft, valuable targets in the form of the oil tankers and refineries that fuel the countries’ economies – and are extremely hard to defend. “The key aspect of piracy in West Africa is that, unlike with what we see on the Horn, it’s particularly geared towards targeting the offshore oil and gas industry,” says Wood. “It’s a narrower targeting than what we see in the East in terms of the industry and vessels they choose, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.”
The exploration of oil continues and could deliver the same resource curse upon relatively stable Ghana as it has in Nigeria. Its Jubilee oil field, discovered in 2007, has reserves of 600 million barrels and made its first delivery in December 2010. As more fields are discovered in countries that line the Gulf, they could follow in the footsteps of the Delta villages that have long suffered from the effects of drilling – especially pollution – but see little economic benefit. Poverty is face to face with oil wealth, and local residents are upset they aren’t benefiting as well.
Unless West African governments learn to distribute their newfound oil wealth more fairly, experts say, the risk of further piracy will rise. “It will become worse as they find [oil] fields not just in Nigeria but in Ghana and as far north as Senegal,” Drake says. “There’s going to be people in coastal communities thinking, There are fields – are we going to have access to them?”
Source: Time
