by Ross Kemp
But that was in the future. For now, I had made some good friends on the Northumberland, but what I really wanted to do had so far eluded me: to speak to a pirate, and to find out straight from the horse’s mouth what drives them to these crimes on the high seas. Is it poverty? Is it organized crime? Is it sheer opportunism? Or is it a mixture of all three? As we said goodbye to the friends we had made on board ship, I realized that I still had a lot more to learn. What I didn’t know was that my next trip, to the waters of a country many hundreds of miles from Somalia, would show me a very different side to the menace of international piracy.
PART 2
The Bight of Benin
Map 2. The Bight of Benin
7. Chop-chop
There’s an old sea shanty, dating from the nineteenth century, about the area I was to visit next in my quest to discover the truth about international piracy.
Beware, beware the Bight of Benin
There’s one that comes out for forty goes in.
That cheerful little jingle was inspired by the risk of malaria to anyone venturing into that part of the world, and it’s true that the illness is more of a threat in this part of Africa than almost anywhere else. But the Bight’s inhospitable nature was not limited to deadly mosquitoes. It was famously a hub of the slave trade; indeed this stretch of land along the western coast of Africa was known as the Slave Coast, and as such it was a busy waterway for ships full of misery.
Nowadays, boats that travel through these waters have different cargos, some legal, some not. The Gulf of Guinea, which comprises the Bight of Benin, the neighbouring Bight of Bonny and the coastlines of the 11 countries that lie between Ghana and Angola, is a major hub for narcotics trafficking. In recent years significant quantities of high-grade cocaine have been seized in these waters because it is part of the drug-trade triangular route between the Cape Verde Islands, the Canary Islands and Madeira.
As well as being part of a drug route, since the late 1990s the area has consistently ranked as one of the top piracy hot spots worldwide. In the two years between 2002 and 2004 there were more pirate attacks in the Gulf of Guinea than in the rest of African waters put together. Today, it is officially the world’s second-biggest piracy hot spot after Somalia, but that statistic doesn’t tell the whole story. A large number of pirate attacks in the Gulf go unreported. After all, if someone nicks your stash of coke, you’re hardly likely to go moaning to the authorities. And if you’re a fisherman whose small boat has been boarded, all your money pinched and then you’ve been thrown overboard and left to your own luck – well, the chances are you’re not going to survive long enough to report the incident. No one knows how many ships are currently being pirated here, but it is thought the Gulf could easily knock Somalia off the top spot.
The Gulf of Guinea extends for 3,400 miles. That’s about the same size as the Gulf of Mexico and in an area of coastline that size, there’s bound to be bits that are less safe than others. One country along the Gulf has the dubious honour of playing host to the majority of pirate attacks in the area. That country is Nigeria, and its piracy problem is escalating. Big time. In 2003 there were four reported attacks; in 2008 there were 107. The Nigerian Trawler Owners’ Association reckoned that in 2006 half of all fishing vessels in Nigerian waters had been pirated. The International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents workers in 148 different countries, has branded Nigeria’s waters a war zone.
Nigerian pirates are different from Somali pirates in one important respect: they kill people. This hasn’t always been the case – until a few years ago they principally targeted cash, valuables and shipping gear. Not any more. Violence is a regular occurrence, and so are killings. In one week alone, not long before I travelled to Nigeria, there were 20 attacks on ships and 10 people killed.
And I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t much like the sound of those odds.
Nigeria’s a long way from home. But I didn’t even have to leave Britain in order to discover that the effects of the country’s piracy problem reached much further than the African coastline. Instead I prepared to meet the Maguire family from the Wirral. Anxious times for anxious people, as I found out when I spoke to Bernard Maguire, whose son Matthew was one of a group of British oil-rig workers who had been on a boat moored at Port Harcourt, the capital of Nigeria’s Rivers State. Matthew is an electrician by trade but wasn’t making the money he needed, so he retrained as a diver. Divers are important to the oil industry, which needs them to work on underwater drilling, inspecting pipes or fixing oil derricks. Diving can be well paid, and Matthew was on a ship waiting to be transported to an oil platform further out to sea so that he could earn a living for himself and his family.
Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go according to plan. The ship was hijacked by 8 to 10 pirates, and 27 crew members originating from a variety of countries were forced into a smaller vessel and onto land. This area of Nigeria is characterized by a vast network of waterways and inlets. The pirates moved their hostages into a smaller speedboat still, and then ferried them to a nearby village.
Over the next few days most of the hostages were released, and each time someone was released, the pirates moved somewhere else along these complex waterways so they couldn’t be tracked down. First the pirates let the Nigerian nationals go, then the various foreign nationals until they had whittled it down to their two British captives. Matthew Maguire and Robin Barry Hughes, captain of the pirated ship, were retained. It turned out that the pirates specifically wanted British hostages, for reasons I would come to understand once I got to Nigeria. The pirates took their hostages deep into the Niger Delta – 27,000 square miles of intricate, intertwined waterways that cover nearly a tenth of Nigeria’s land mass. There was some attempt by the authorities to locate them, but it was an impossible task. Hole yourself away in the Niger Delta and nobody is ever going to find you…
All this had happened some five months previously. Since that time neither man’s family had heard from him. Matthew Maguire had a wife and three young children back home, and his father’s face spoke eloquently about his worry as I sat down to talk to him. Word had reached him that one of the two hostages was seriously ill, but they didn’t know which one. I could only imagine the worry the family must have been feeling. ‘It’s little things of a night,’ he told me, trying to put a brave face on it, but not entirely succeeding, ‘when you’re trying to go to sleep, or you wake up early because you’re thinking about the conditions he’s kept in. Stupid things like shower, clothes, what food is he eating, where’s he sleeping.’ All the minutiae of day-to-day living, the things parents are hard-wired to worry about, no matter that their son was grown up with children of his own. Stupid things? They didn’t sound stupid to me at all, especially knowing what I knew about Nigerian pirates’ readiness to kill their hostages.
The question was, why had Matthew Maguire and Robin Barry Hughes been taken? Was this an opportunist attack like the one I had witnessed in the Gulf of Aden? Were the pirates looking for a sizeable monetary ransom in return for their assets? Or was there something else going on here? In order to work out the reasons for Matthew Maguire’s kidnapping, I would have to learn more about the precarious political situation in Nigeria. As had been the case in the Gulf of Aden, in order to understand what was occurring on the water, I would need to gain a better grasp of what was happening on land.
The kidnapping of Matthew Maguire and Robin Barry Hughes was by no means a one-off. Until recently Nigeria was the world’s eighth-biggest oil producer. Where there’s oil, there are oil companies – huge multinational corporations who import workers with the expertise necessary to pump black gold from deep under the earth from around the world. In Nigeria there are an estimated 20,000 of them. These oil workers are well paid for their time and professionalism, but their rewards come at a price. Each year more than a hundred are kidnapped by pirates. If I was going to find out why this was happening, I would have to go straight to the centre
of the problem. So it was that I boarded a plane for Lagos. It was the first time I had travelled to this part of Africa, and as I took to the skies I was more than a little apprehensive about what it was I would find when I got there.
In 2003 the respected magazine New Scientist published a survey which claimed to rank more than 65 countries in order of happiness. I don’t know how you can measure happiness but Nigeria, to the surprise of many, came top. The happiest country in the world. Maybe it is. It certainly has the raw materials for happiness: sandy beaches, spectacular tropical forests, magnificent waterfalls and, perhaps most importantly, enough oil to make it one of the richest, most affluent countries on earth. You would think that the inhabitants of such a country would be very happy indeed.
But there’s a flip side. Nigeria might be oil rich and beautiful, but it has some of the worst social indicators in the world. One in five children dies before the age of five; 12 million do not get to go to school; there are nearly 2 million Aids orphans; more than half the population lives below the poverty line. Life expectancy at birth is 47. Per capita income is $1,400 – that’s not as bad as Somalia, but it isn’t far off. Walk almost anywhere in Nigeria and you can guarantee that someone will come up and ask you for ‘chop-chop’ – money for food. Take a camera out, and someone will approach you, demanding to see your papers and asking for chop-chop. A lot of them are just trying it on, but plenty of Nigerians are genuinely hungry. Far be it for me to say whether these statistics should be a fly in the ointment for the Nigerian people, but I think they might take the smile off my face.
The Nigerians themselves have a joke. Jesus looks down from heaven and he says to God, ‘Father, look at that country. They have so much. Why did you give them all this: the oil, those natural resources, the fertile soil, the beautiful landscape?’ God smiles and winks at Jesus. ‘Just wait,’ he says, ‘until you see what sort of people I’m going to give them.’
Perhaps the Nigerians do themselves an injustice. In my time in their country I met some genuinely friendly, good people. But there’s no way of denying that Nigeria has its fair share of rotten apples. Anyone with an email account will have received mail from scam artists claiming to be rich Nigerians, and the famous 419 scam originated in Nigeria. So called because number 419 is the article of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud, this scam involves a letter or email claiming to be from a Nigerian citizen who knows the whereabouts of a large sum of money – in the bank account of a deposed leader perhaps, or belonging to a terminally ill person with no friends or relatives. A good scammer will make some effort to ensure that the story stands up to scrutiny, so if someone decides to investigate, they don’t fall at the first hurdle. The recipient of the letter – or ‘investor’ – is offered a substantial chunk of that money if they ‘assist’ the scammer in retrieving this money. If the investor bites, they are sent a load of official-looking documentation; sometimes they are asked to travel all the way to Nigeria. However the scam unfolds, you can bet your bottom dollar that at some point in the proceedings they’ll be asked for money – most often to pay a tax or a bribe. And the moment they hand over any money, of course, the scammer disappears.
It might sound like a pretty obvious swindle to you and me, but if a few million such emails are sent out, it only takes a small percentage to fall for it and the exercise is made worthwhile. And worthwhile it certainly is: in Lagos, 419 scammers have proper business premises. They make money doing it. Walk around Lagos and you’ll see houses and cars with the number 419 marked on them. That means, don’t try to buy this house or this car: someone’s already tried to do it and it doesn’t really belong to the person pretending to own it.
It would be grossly unfair to paint all Nigerians with this brush, but the point is that corruption is commonplace. Every petty official will ask you for chop-chop; even the police will demand it. This corruption goes all the way up to the highest echelons of the government and, as I would find out, it’s a major cause of the piracy that I was here to investigate.
Nigeria is a troubled country with a troubled history. Like so many African states, it has a history of colonization, independence and bloody civil war. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach the Nigerian coast, and they named the port of Lagos after the town of the same name in the Algarve. (It means ‘lagoon’.) This was in the late fifteenth century, and in the 400 years that followed Nigeria became a hub of the slave trade, with millions of its people being traded, principally to the Americas but also elsewhere round the world.
The British rolled up in the nineteenth century, just after the Napoleonic wars. On 1 January 1901 the whole of Nigeria became a British protectorate, with Britain governing by ‘indirect rule’ through local leaders. In keeping with Britain’s colonial past, the slave trade was, almost unbelievably, not banned in Nigeria until 1936. By the middle of the century, a huge wave of anti-colonial feeling was sweeping over Africa. Nigeria was no exception. Despite the fact that the country was divided into more than 200 separate tribes, there was an increase in nationalistic feeling and demands for independence became frequent. Nigeria finally gained independence in 1960, just two years after the first barrels of Nigerian crude oil left the country destined for the world market.
The first Nigerian administration – a coalition government – managed six years of power before the prime minister, the splendidly named Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, was killed in a coup. There followed many years of political strife, corruption and military coups, some bloodless, others distinctly bloody. There was a three-year civil war during which a million Nigerians were killed. But throughout all this one thing kept Nigeria very firmly on the map and in the minds of major powers around the world.
Oil. Because Nigeria had, and has, a hell of a lot of it.
In the 1970s Nigeria joined OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The densely populated Niger Delta region produced billions of dollars’ worth of oil and attracted oil workers from around the world. In 1983 the government expelled over a million foreigners – mostly Ghanaians – on the basis that their visas had expired and they were taking jobs from Nigerians. It was a popular move, but of course it didn’t stop people drilling for oil.
In 1991 the capital city of Nigeria was moved from Lagos on the coast to Abuja in the middle of the country. The reasons for moving the capital were numerous: Abuja was deemed to be located in territory neutral to the many tribes and clans of the country; Lagos was overcrowded and sprawling; and Lagos suffered, politically speaking, from its geographical position. It is made up of a number of islands separated by creeks, lagoons and waterways – a complicated, labyrinthine network. The main islands are connected by bridges, but are easy to defend if they’re taken over in a coup. There had been so many of these since Nigeria’s independence that successive governments, frightened of being deposed in the same way that they themselves had seized power, felt the need to move the capital somewhere a little more secure. Hence Abuja, which I’m told is a fantastic place with expensive buildings and manicured lawns, although you can only live there if you’re in the government, the oil business or the service industries.
Truth was, however, it didn’t matter how well manicured the lawns of Abuja were; from the point of view of my investigation into pirates, it was of no interest. Lagos, however – the dirty, sprawling, impoverished, busy, dirty lagoon town – was a different matter.
Lagos is the fastest-growing city on the planet. It’s certainly the most chaotic I’ve ever been to. In the 1950s it had a population of about 250,000 people. Today, depending on who you talk to, the population is somewhere between 9 million and 18 million. It may no longer be Nigeria’s capital, but it’s by far the country’s biggest city. Like many expanding cities, it faces certain challenges: unemployment, crime, corruption and pollution to name a few. The poverty that blights Nigeria is at its peak here: many people (though not all) live on a pittance; it has been known for armed criminals to have shoot-outs with the
police in the busy streets of the city.
Now, though, it has a new problem to deal with. That problem is piracy.
Lagos is West Africa’s principal and busiest port. Seventy-five per cent of all the country’s goods arrive there by sea. That means a lot of shipping and, as I’d already seen, where there’s lots of ships, there’s lots of pirates. It was Lagos, therefore, that would be my first port of call in my attempt to hunt down the dangerous pirates of Nigeria.