Too much law, too little order in suppressing growing threat of West African piracy
 AS a global industry, piracy has seen better days, and the reason for its pronounced decline off the coast of East Africa and Indian Ocean is a willingness to kill and prosecute pirates with an energy that was absent in the past.
Five, six years ago before a Russian naval force landed on one of their own captured ships and shot anyone who looked like a pirate mindless of who was friend or foe, they spared one of the captured sea robbers, cut off his ears and sent him home to share the experience with his brethren. After that pirates, did not mess with Russian ships.
Meanwhile other naval forces behaved more like Ferdinand the bull. The Germans were tied to rules of engagement that prevented them from firing unless fired upon. Pirates continued their piratical activities mindful not to fire on the Germans, whose ships followed meekly behind until they were sent packing by piratical threats to end the lives of hostages they persisted in following.
No western government wanted the odium of such a scandal involving white soldiers and sailors killing black fishermen who were mistaken as pirates. Though often, as it has been the case throughout the history of piracy, pirates camouflaged themselves as fishermen, which they were, when not engaged in piracy.
Soon shipboard armed guards, or security contractors as they were then known, offered their services. In Iraq, the US Government hired them in divisional strength. They were well paid but had no pensions and no employment protections under US law. But because they were overseas hires, there was no need to comply with female content guidelines or insist that personnel be American.
But there was much resistance to putting them aboard ships. Industry associations condemned the practice, coming up with "best practices," which while legally sound, had little or no other value. "Best practice" involved using screeching sound guns, which tended to mystify the pirates rather than repel them, or high pressure water hoses which did little to dampen piratical enthusiasm or encasing ships with razor wire, which was hard to put up and harder to take down.
Typically, the pirates approached the ships traversing the Indian Ocean on high-speed skiffs launched from "mother ships", typically medium to large fishing boats. Their targets were typically low and slow tankers and bulkers, though it was a small containership, which appeared to be the tipping point after which Somali piracy began to decline.
Pirates used rope and grappling hooks to draw up scaling ladders, take over the bridge, eventually turning the wheelhouse into a place of confinement for their hostages as it a controllable large area with toilet facilities where the captives would be kept for weeks if not months. In some cases more than a year.
Usually containerships were immune from attack being too big and too fast for the pirate skiffs. What's more, the stacks of containers on the deck made it hard for an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) to get a clear shot at the bridge.
But when pirates captured a US flagged containership, the comparatively tiny 1,092-TEU Maersk Alabama, off Somalia in 2009, the Americans took off the kid gloves. With Navy Seal snipers lodged on the fantail of the destroyer USS Bainbridge they killed the pirates and rescued Captain Richard Phillips. Tom Hanks starred in the movie. Not only did this bring in containerships into the picture, put it brought in the US in as a concerned party. Surviving pirates were brought to trial and given long prison terms.
And over time, more and more armed guards were accepted as part of nautical life. While these steps were taken, the piracy boom was not over. Ransoms moved up from US$1 million to $2 million to a high of $7 million in the case of Hong Kong's managed Anglo-Eastern ship, the 26,350-ton chemical carrier Fairchem Bogey, and its crew, who were eventually released by Somali pirates.
Somalia itself was a failed state with the pirates having as much authority ruling their patch as any other warlord governing another. Movies like Blackhawk Down showed that however impoverished Somalis were, they still punched more than their weight militarily and could defy advanced militaries arrayed against them. But in recent years the warlord running Puntland province managed to raid the pirates by land while the western navies squeezed them from the sea. Add to that, shipboard armed guards were so successful that a rate war broke out among them and they were now cheaper than ever.
But just as piracy was slowing down off the coast of East Africa, it was coming to a boil in West Africa on the other side of the continent. At first - again 10 years ago - it was hardly perceptible, rather like the piracy practiced in the southern South China Seas today around Indonesia and Malaysia it was largely confined to knife-wielding men in small craft rapidly boarding a small ships at anchor, and stealing any valuables they could find and then fleeing. Then, in both cases, piracy graduated into siphoning off oil products, mostly petrol and kerosene and selling it to locals.
And so it was in West Africa with knife wielders grabbing what they could and siphoning off petrol to sell to locals. But in the last year, West Africans, typically from Nigeria and neighbouring Benin emulated their East African brothers and began to take hostages for ransom - where the real money was.
Crew kidnapping is on the rise in Gulf of Guinea, despite de-escalation in other areas, said security firm Dryad Maritime in its second quarter 2016 report.
On the law enforcement side, or rather the piracy suppression side, the east and West African anti-piracy stories diverge sharply. In West Africa, there was plenty of law enforcement against those working to suppress piracy by preventing any armed activity by non-government personnel, then relenting to allow armed private security contractors if they are citizens of countries operating in that country's territorial waters.
That was the big difference east and west. Pirates off east Africa operated mostly in international waters - the high seas - where no government could intervene.
But in the Gulf of Guinea, there are many were jurisdictions starting with Angola's stretching all the way to Sierra Leone's with the shorelines of the Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea and Liberia in between - all jealously insisting on sovereignty over their own patch of territorial waters in which only their citizens could exercise armed authority.
Meanwhile, West African pirates, careless of such niceties, roved freely attacking tankers. While these countries are rich in pettifogging lawyers and bureaucrats, they are poor in patrol boats and reliable marine protection.
Thus, the solution to the problem, is to have professional, and trusted armed guards, who are sufficiently protected from bureaucratic and legal harassment to do the job. It was these armed guards, the happy in their work as security contractors, who by their evident willingness to offer battle, dissuaded pirates from attacking ships off Somalia.
Militarily the problems seems simple enough to solve, but getting governments to moved in the same direction is like "herding cats" as the BIMCO security chief once said of western governments in the beginning of the East African piracy scourge.
Perhaps a good place to start is to get the Gulf of Guinea governments to agree on a security contractor licensing scheme. BIMCO already as a draft contract. One country may well be nervous about another's navy patrol its waters. Thus, this may be the job for the private sector to first repel and boarders allowing naval forces to make the arrest once an attack in progress. Private-public partnership seems to be the key element here.
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