Tag: piracy

The Chief of Naval Staff, Vice-Admiral Dele Ezeoba, has said incessant attacks on ships in Nigerian waters, especially in the Niger Delta, should be blamed on insiders.

Ezeoba spoke in Brass, Bayelsa State, after inaugurating the Maritime Regional Awareness Capability (RMAC) Centre.

He was reacting to the recent attack on a Marshal Island-flagged vessel, MT. ALCHE, and the abduction of a Ukrainian captain and a Greek engineer by pirates off the coast of Brass.

The Niger Delta has continued to witness the kidnapping of expatriates for ransom, despite the huge money spent on the amnesty programme for ex-militants.

In most cases, companies are compelled to pay huge amounts of money as ransom for the release of their workers by the kidnappers.

Recently, a company was said to have paid N55 million to secure the release of two expatriates, who were held by gunmen in the creeks of Amasoma, Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State.

A security source, who pleaded anonymity, said the firm that owns MT. ALCHE had intensified negotiations with the pirates for the release of the Ukrainian and the Greek.

Ezeoba said investigations of similar incidents in the past by the navy showed that some crew members told the pirates the locations of their vessels.

The Naval Chief said RMAC has surveillance capability of identifying piracy, illegal oil bunkering and other criminal activities hundreds of kilometres within the maritime space.

Ezeoba said though no society was devoid of criminality, the Nigerian maritime space was safe, despite pockets of criminal activities.

He said: “In every society, you must have incidences of criminality. If in two to five months, you have one incident of criminality, it tells us that the maritime space is safe.

“We are doing the best we can, but that will not take away the fact that, at some points, we have gaps and these gaps are not created out of the blues.

“If you take a census of what happened from investigations, you will discover that the vessel that was stolen had insiders onboard, who collaborated with the bad guys for that incident to occur. I am talking from experience.”

Oil companies operate in communities whose indigenes daily complain that the rush for ‘black gold’ has not led to an improvement in their economic conditions, a situation experts believe is fueling criminality, reports NBC News

Anger and frustration that Nigeria’s huge oil wealth has not improved the lot of most average citizens is fueling the sort of criminality that led to the kidnapping of two American oil workers off the country’s coast last month, experts say.

“There is a lot of anger within the local communities (where these oil companies operate) that the rush for ‘black gold’ has not led to an improvement in (people’s) economic conditions,” said Leke Oyewole, President Goodluck Jonathan’s special adviser on maritime services. Oyewole spoke to NBC News after U.S.-flagged oil supply vessel C-Retriever was targeted in the Gulf of Guinea in late October.

According to maritime news website gCaptain, the ship’s American captain and chief engineer were abducted. U.S. officials told NBC News at the time that the working assumption was that the pair had been kidnapped for ransom.

“You need to see some (foreign) compounds,” Oyewole said. “The oil company compounds could easily be comparable to living conditions in London or America, but immediately outside their fence local people are living in slums in most cases.”

“The people are angry the waters they use are polluted, so they’re angry with them and often attack them and kidnap the workers.”

Piracy and kidnapping off Nigeria — 70 percent of whose export revenue comes from petroleum — and neighboring Benin has gotten so bad that the region was deemed as dangerous as the waters off Somalia on Africa’s east coast, according to London-based Lloyd’s Market Association, an umbrella group of insurers.

The country is now considered the world’s number one kidnap hotspot, according to security firm NYA. Meanwhile, the number of attacks off its coast are growing, according to the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre. The organization recorded 28 attacks last year — almost three times the number in 2011.

Nigeria’s problems with piracy and generalised criminality got especially bad after the oil industry destroyed traditional jobs, said Dr. Freedom Onouha of the Nigeria National Defense College.

“For a very long time people survived on the waters, particularly on fishing, so this is what is at the very heart of maritime security,” he said. “The oil companies came in and this had significant consequences on the environment in terms of oil spills and pollution, which killed the natural resources of the Niger Delta — destroying original livelihoods.”

Instead of becoming fisherman, they turned to criminal fisherman who are fishing for crime,” he said. “When young men are not finding legitimate employment or being handsomely rewarded… they’re drawn to violence, because the other opportunities are limited or they do not exist.

“And the oil is not providing job opportunities for them,” he added.

There is also the problem of militancy, according to Joseph Hurst-Croft of the British and Niger Delta-based charity, the Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN). He believes the roots of modern Nigerian piracy can be traced back to a wave of militancy in the early 2000s when people protested about a lack of oil revenues being invested back into local communities.

“This quickly evolved into criminality,” he said. “These young armed men realized there were rewards.”

Problems with piracy, kidnapping and oil theft got so bad between 2005 and 2009 that it began to affect the entire oil industry.

So current president Jonathan, who was vice president at the time, negotiated an amnesty that saw over 30,000 militants pardoned. Financial aid was offered to train the men in a variety of professions ranging from electricians to doctors.

Instead of solving the problem of criminality, the government’s move only exacerbated it, Hurst-Croft said.

The amnesty “showed that people get bought off and gave the impression that violence pays,” he said.

But the main problem with the programme was that while it worked for those participating in it, it did nothing for the vast majority of men who still saw few ways out of the crushing poverty they had been born into.

“So the challenge will be maintaining and improving overall conditions that make it possible to stop the criminality,” Onuoha said.

And until a sustained anti-corruption and economic improvement campaign’s are launched to stop piracy off Nigeria, Hurst-Croft said he fears piracy problems may continue or grow worse.

“Do you go after Al Capone or do you go after the guys in the prohibition bars,” he added. “At the moment it seems like the guys in the bars.”