The seas off West Africa’s oil-rich coastline are now the most dangerous in the world for shipping, according to a new report.

One Earth Future, which produces an annual State of Maritime Piracy, says that while attacks have been falling substantially in some regions of the world, in West Africa they’ve been on the rise and are now more frequent than anywhere else.

So why the increase in West Africa, and what shipping is being targeted?

What is piracy?

A strict definition of maritime piracy only includes attacks on shipping on the high seas – that is, more than 12 nautical miles off the coastline and not under the jurisdiction of any state.

Inside a country’s territorial waters and within port facilities, these attacks are defined as armed robberies at sea.

However, the data we’ve used from this latest report combines these two sets of data to give an overall picture of incidents at sea both inshore and offshore.

In 2018, there were 112 such incidents in West African waters.

It’s not just the huge tankers exporting oil and gas from Nigeria and Ghana that are targeted.

Commercial ships from smaller countries are also in the sights of the pirates.

At a recent event in London, President Faure Gnassingbé of Togo – a country sandwiched between these two regional giants – highlighted his own concerns at the rise in attacks on regional shipping.

“Our region is distinguished by the resurgence of transnational criminality on the high seas in the Gulf of Guinea,” said Mr Gnassingbé.

Why are attacks rising?

Most of the attacks have been against ships involved in oil and gas transportation, such as tankers, bulk carriers and tugs. Fishing vessels have also been targeted.

The coastline off Nigeria saw the most attacks in 2018. This is partly because of “petro-piracy”, targeting tankers from Nigeria’s rich oil and gas fields.

There were also incidents reported at the loading and anchorage facilities in the Nigerian port of Lagos.

Piracy in the form of hijacking and kidnapping for ransom payments was also common off the coasts of Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon.

Rich pickings at sea, political instability, the lack of law enforcement and poverty on land are all factors which have contributed to the increase in piracy.

Most of the seafarers affected are not from the region. Around half are from the Philippines, followed by India, Ukraine and Nigeria.

One of the reasons West Africa is now the number one spot for piracy is because of the downward trends recorded elsewhere.

The East African shipping routes along the Somali coastline have been notorious for hijackings and robberies.

But since peaking in 2011, rates of piracy there have fallen off dramatically in recent years.

This is in large measure as a result of a successful multi-national effort to patrol these waters and take firm action action against acts of piracy.

Local efforts on land in Somalia to change attitudes towards permitting piracy and building legal capacity to prosecute criminals have also helped improve the situation.

In Asia, the Malacca Strait, a busy, commercially important stretch of water between Malaysia and Indonesia, experienced a high number of attacks in 2015.

Concerted action by regional naval forces has reduced the problem there, but piracy still persists.

Attacks against shipping in the Caribbean and off the coast of Latin American have, however, risen.

Venezuela in particular has become a hotspot for piracy.

“Political and economic instability is a big factor there,” says Lydelle Joubert, an expert on piracy at One Earth Future.

Source: BBC News Africa

By Majeed Dahiru

While the political leadership of Nigeria was basking in the euphoria of a false sense of triumph, the dynamics in the theatre of war has changed from civilian terrorism to a full blown insurgency, which has seen ISWAP take ground forces of mainly the Nigerian army head on, leaving many dead and carting away caches of arms.

The Muhammadu Buhari administration has been unable to draw a line of distinction between politics and governance in the business of government since its coming to power in 2015. Round the clock, the administration appears to be distracted by partisan politics, away from its critical function of state management. Its pre-occupation with politics at the detriment of governance has resulted in the politicisation of national security to such an extent that the precarious situation it inherited in 2015 has become worse four years after in 2019.

Almost always in a hurry to give the impression of having succeeded where its predecessors failed, the Buhari administration inadvertently made the failures of the past its bench mark for measuring its own success. By often resorting to measuring its success against the failures of the past, rather than against a benchmark of overall indices of good governance in line with acceptable international standards of best practices, the Buhari administration has reduced the barometer of comparative governance to a competition between two sets of incompetencies.

By viewing the problem of insecurity, pretty much like other fundamental issues of the economy and corruption, through the narrow prism of exclusivist partisanship, President Buhari under estimated the Boko Haram insurgency by considering his predecessors’ inability to rein in the group as entirely their individual faults. President Buhari’s simplistic reduction of the Boko Haram terrorism to corruption and indiscipline of past administrations, was responsible for the faulty diagnosis of a problem that is far beyond the physical but rooted in a radical ideology of global Islamist revivalism.

The Buhari administration gleefully took credit for the appreciably scaled down level of lethal attacks on mostly soft targets in vulnerable places such as markets, schools, mosques and churches, in wide range of areas outside the North East including Abuja, by triumphantly declaring “Boko Haram technically defeated”. This premature declaration of victory over the insurgents was not only disingenuous but a wilful display of ignorance about the true nature of the enemy, in what became the greatest undoing of the government’s war on terrorism effort.

The scaled down attacks on soft targets, which reduced civilian casualties, while the Boko Haram insurgency appears to have been restricted to the North-East, wasn’t so much the effort of the Buhari administration but a deliberate change of tactical strategy by the terror group. In March 2015, Abubakar Shekau, the Boko Haram leader pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL) and was acknowledged by a top official of the international Islamist terror group, Abu Mohammad Al-Adnani. That singular act, henceforth, internationalised an otherwise local insurgent group that was under immense pressure from the renewed offensive of Nigeria’s security forces, which pressed it to the fringes of Sambisa forest, while several communities that had been earlier occupied where liberated in the process.

The ferocious resurgence of Boko Haram is an indication that contrary to official claims, the deadly sect is far from being degraded. To sustain the impression in the public space…the Muhammadu Buhari administration has deployed more energy to either suppress or obscure and, in some cases, filter information about the true state of things at the epicentre of the war…

Following its effective internationalisation, Boko Haram was directed by ISIL to subsequently abide by the Islamic rules of war engagement, which forbids the killing of unarmed and non-hostile Muslim targets. In effect, this meant a cessation of indiscriminate suicide bombings and attacks on mosques, markets, schools, as well as other soft targets, including unarmed and non-hostile Muslims. This was also a strategic move to regain its lost religious legitimacy among the local Muslim population, following the carnage visited upon them and their communities, which pressed them towards the government side. Abubakar Shekau, who is clearly imbued with the Takfiri doctrine, which equates disobedience to disbelief, would have none of this. As far as he is concerned, any Muslim who is not heeding the global call for Jihad by joining the ranks of his Boko Haram group, is not a Muslim in the first place.

Following Abubakar Shekau’s refusal to abide by the Islamic rules of war engagement, a split in the ranks of the Boko Haram insurgents occurred in 2016. A powerful column of fighters and commanders broke with the original Boko Haram group, forming a splinter under the banner of the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP), and led by the ISIL-appointed Abu Musab al-Barnawi. This split left the Abubakar Shekau group sufficiently weakened and unable to carry on its hitherto indiscriminate killing sprees across the country, which gave the false impression of a technically defeated Boko Haram.

ISWAP, otherwise known as the Albarnawi group, in complete obedience of the Islamic rules of war engagement, by meticulously avoiding Muslim targets and backed by ISIL logistics, as well as training, will emerge as a ferocious fighting force. Between 2016 and 2019, ISWAP has swooped on several hard targets, including military installations, inflicting the heaviest casualties on Nigeria’s security, on a scale never seen since the civil war. While the political leadership of Nigeria was basking in the euphoria of a false sense of triumph, the dynamics in the theatre of war has changed from civilian terrorism to a full blown insurgency, which has seen ISWAP take ground forces of mainly the Nigerian army head on, leaving many dead and carting away caches of arms.

The ferocious resurgence of Boko Haram is an indication that contrary to official claims, the deadly sect is far from being degraded. To sustain the impression in the public space about its self-assessed successes in the war against terror, the Muhammadu Buhari administration has deployed more energy to either suppress or obscure and, in some cases, filter information about the true state of things at the epicentre of the war, than to the real task of energising boots on the ground to decisively defeat one of the world’s deadliest insurgent groups.

In the past week alone, ISWAP has attacked military bases in Damasak, Monguno, Mobbar and Nganzai local governments of Borno State. These attacks also coincided with a suicide attack by the Abubakar Shekau-led Boko Haram group, which left several people dead and injured in Konduga town, some 36 kilometres from Maiduguri the state capital.

While the government is pre-occupied with well-choreographed cameo freak shows of its successes in degrading Boko Haram insurgents, the deadly activities of the group have not only become widespread like untreated cancerous cells in the human body, but have actually stretched Nigeria’s security forces to breaking limits. Whereas, the Boko Haram insurgents have mutated into a well-armed professional fighting force, the Nigerian Army has been left without adequate men, equipment and motivation. In the past week alone, ISWAP has attacked military bases in Damasak, Monguno, Mobbar and Nganzai local governments of Borno State. These attacks also coincided with a suicide attack by the Abubakar Shekau-led Boko Haram group, which left several people dead and injured in Konduga town, some 36 kilometres from Maiduguri the state capital.

Frustrated by the lack of progress on the frontlines of the war on terror, Nigeria’s army chief, General Yusuf Buratai made a startling revelation to the effect that, “it is unfortunate, but the truth is that almost every setback the Nigerian Army has had in our operations in recent times can be traced to insufficient willingness to perform assigned tasks or simply insufficient commitment to a common national and military course by those at the frontline”. This is a clear indication that Boko Haram has technically defeated Buratai’s Army.

An insurgency that is primarily driven by a radical ideology cannot be defeated by the force of arms alone. Similarly, the leadership of Nigeria’s security forces that is heavily skewed in favour of a section of the country is not likely to command national loyalty. That ISWAP abides faithfully with the ISIL decreed Islamic rules of war engagement, which forbids the killing of unarmed and non-hostile Muslims, is of strategic disadvantage to Buratai’s Army as the insurgents now enjoy enormous legitimacy as the predominantly Muslim population in the main theatre of the war on terror no longer consider them as lethal adversaries. The implication of this is far-reaching, to the extent that there is a near freeze in cooperation between the local population and government forces, particularly in the area of native intelligence-sharing, making it easily possible for ISWAP to occupy larger swathes of land today than ever before through the hearts and minds of the native Muslim population.

Considering the reality that the seeds of radicalisation were sown in the mainstream Muslim theology guarantees a steady flow of radicalised individuals that are daily swelling the ranks of the insurgents, at a rate that outpaces both its own loss of men, with capabilities to overwhelm an already overstretched Buratai Army. It is the seeming intractability of the war on terror, arising from an incompetent political leadership of the Nigerian state, that has made officers and men of the Nigerian Army war-weary. Unfortunately, concerted efforts to tame the scourge of radical Islamic ideology, which propels global Jihadi movements such as ISWAP, has not been activated, as the conservative political leadership of northern Nigeria appears to make useful tool out of this situation for election protectionism against non-Muslim Nigeria, in the power struggle over the control of state resources for elite benefit. The long term strategy of ISWAP is to effectively decimate Nigeria’s entire security forces substantially, in terms of men and equipment, by narrowing the insurgency to a single theatre of war in the North-East corner of Nigeria.

Majeed Dahiru, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja and can be reached through dahirumajeed@gmail.com.

Source: P.M. News

It was a day of bountiful harvest for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Ibadan zonal office, on Thursday, June 20, 2019 as operatives of the Commission stormed hideouts of suspected internet fraudsters in Osogbo, the Osun State capital.

The early morning raid led to the arrest of 27 men and four ladies suspected to be girlfriends of some of the arrested suspects.

Officials of the Commission have embarked on weeks of surveillance, working on series of intelligence gathered on the activities of suspected ‘Yahoo Boys’ in locations across the city.

The intelligence was found to be substantially credible, leading to the sting operation on Thursday.

Among those arrested are Adeleke Peter, Babalola Abiodun, Aduroja Temitope, Abdulazeez Razak, Adesina Adewale, Osayintoba Dare, Adebowale Fadairo, Abdulazeez Abdullahi, Akinseye Samuel and Osanyintoba Femi.

Exotic cars recovered from ‘Yahoo Boys’

Others include: Austin Onyekachukwu, Oluwaseun Adesina, Ibosiola Olamilekan, Ayoola Lekan, Abdullahi Owopade, Olatunbosun Kolawole, Saheed Adebola, Osanyintoba Pelumi, Ayo Bello, Samuel Emmanuel, Olalekan Oladele, Solomon Mattew, Oyelude Opeyemi, Quadri Olatunji, Ibrahim Alao, Tunde Bello and Fatolu Temitope.

The Commission also recovered eight exotic cars including two Lexus and six Toyota brands, as well as many costly phones and laptops, among other items.

The suspects, who variously claimed to be graduates, students, computer engineers and businessmen, are currently undergoing interrogation to ascertain their level of involvement in the alleged act.

They will be charged to court as soon as investigations are concluded.

P. M. News

The Senate Deputy President, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, urges Nigerians to let bygones be bygones by not focusing on what happened in the 8th Senate.

Omo-Agege promised that things will be better handled in the 9th Senate.

The senator became infamous for snatching away the mace from the Senate in 2018. But he said that was in the past.

Senator Omo-Agege made this known on Monday while receiving members of the Senate press corps who were on a courtesy visit at his residence in Abuja.

He told them: “Events of the 8th Senate are now in the past, and we should let them remain so. You are all aware of the events that happened in the run-up to the election of the principal officers of the Senate but I can assure you that those things will not affect the way things will be done this time around, he stressed.”

“We are 109 senators, with 107 participating in that election and out of that number, I had 68 votes, which means that 67 of my colleagues voted for me and my own vote made it 68. And it’s obvious that 62 votes came from my fellow party members in the APC while the other votes that made up the figure, came from our colleagues in the other parties. And we cannot take their support for granted, we must work as one Senate irrespective of political divide or our beliefs.”

The 9th National Assembly is on two weeks recess following last week’s inauguration and the election of principal officers.

The Lawmakers are expected to reconvene in plenary on July 2, 2019.