by Ross Kemp
Lagos is the busiest, most congested city I’ve ever seen. Traffic jams – or, as the Nigerians have it, ‘go-slows’ – sit motionless in the searing heat, the air is thick with humidity and petrol fumes and people swarm around you in their thousands. One guidebook describes it as ‘chaos theory made flesh and concrete’. Elevated motorways surround the city, the ever-present go-slows on top, tin shacks underneath. I can’t begin to describe how hot it is – sweat pours from your face, your eyes, and your clothes are constantly soaked. The streets are strewn with litter and the people stride around with a swaggering kind of purpose. Lagos has expanded because people come here to make money, and everyone seems to be hustling something. Millions don’t succeed: you see poverty on the street corners, but I was also very aware of the divide between the haves and the have-nots. There are some very rich people in Lagos, and an expat community with its oil money and yacht clubs. As I’d seen in other parts of the world, that’s never a good mix. Even though there’s an expat community, white people still stick out like a sore thumb. Arrive at the port of Lagos and you can be in no doubt that you’re in the heart of black Africa.
There was no luxurious accommodation for this Western film crew when we arrived in West Africa. Far from it. Our hotel, run by Christian Lebanese, was to put it mildly not nice. No concierge at the door; instead, there were grim-faced guards armed with the ubiquitous AK-47s. You only have that for one reason: because there are people out there who want to come into your hotel and steal everything you’ve got. The place was full of brass – prostitutes coming in and out to service the needs of the hotel’s fluid population. Despite all this, there were plenty of Western faces around. Nigeria might be a tense place, but the prospect of a quick buck was enough to embolden people. A lot of these people get robbed, particularly to and from the airport and particularly if they’re not with the right people (it’s very rare that you see an oyibo – a white man – in a car by himself ). But still they come.
I was doing my opening piece to camera when we came up against the difficulties of getting things done in Nigeria. I walked towards the place I’d left Will the cameraman and Kiff the sound man, unable to see them through the crowd of locals. Like all white people, we stood out, but we stood out more than most because Kiff had lost his right arm in an accident – instead of a hand he had metal pincers. Suddenly I realized the guys weren’t there. I looked around. Nothing but a sea of black faces, so I used my mobile phone to call Will.
‘Will, where are you?’
He almost managed to sound sheepish. ‘We’ve been arrested,’ he said.
‘Arrested? Who by?’
‘The port authority. For filming without permission.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – Will hadn’t even been pointing his camera at the port. It seems that didn’t matter. Day one of shooting and our camera crew had been nicked. It took ages to sort everything out, and in the end we only managed to do so by a pretty unconventional method. The guy who ran the port authority split his time between the UK and Lagos. As a result, it turned out that he was a fan. In return for a photograph with me that he could put on the Internet and a little bit of a bung, he agreed to help release Will and Kiff and give us permission to film in the port. Chop-chop, snap snap, job done. The boss man was happy and we had what we wanted, but I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if our soap opera-loving official hadn’t recognized my face…
My first meeting in Nigeria was with Duncan Macnicol, a former ship’s captain who now works as a shipping agent across West Africa, helping shipping operators navigate their way through the mountains of red tape, inefficiency and corruption that go with trying to get a vessel into the port of Lagos. He had lived and worked in Lagos for nearly 20 years and had promised to show me some footage of a very recent pirate attack. The captain of the targeted vessel had taken the footage from the bridge wing. It was grainy and unprofessional, but that didn’t matter: you could easily make out what was going on. The pirates were using what had once been a lifeboat from a ship. I watched as the boat approached from the starboard side of the vessel. It circled round as the pirates fired heavy-calibre and automatic weapons towards the ship. You could see the flashes from the guns and hear the crack as the ammo slammed against its target. It was a violent display, full of intent and, I suppose, bravado. They clearly meant business, and you wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of an attack like that.
Duncan explained to me that piracy was on the increase in Nigeria, and the reason for this was two-fold. First, there was what was known as the Niger Delta problem. This is a political dispute which has led, among other things, to pirates attacking oil tankers in the Delta region. Second, he explained, there are so many merchant vessels lying offshore at Lagos that they are sitting ducks, easy targets for anyone of a piratical bent to hit and make a quick buck. It was the Niger Delta problem that would become the focus of my investigation into piracy in Nigeria. But before I followed that lead Duncan offered to take me out into Lagos harbour, just so I could see what he meant when he described the merchant ships out there as sitting ducks.
8. The Victims
Go-slows aren’t limited to the roads of Lagos. Its port plays host to them too. The vessels might not be crunched up against each other in the same way the cars are; there may not be the shouting and the frenzy. But make no mistake about it: trying to unload your goods in Lagos means joining the mother of all traffic jams.
Extraordinary bureaucracy and a crumbling and corrupt infrastructure mean that nothing can happen at anything other than a creeping pace. To get a ship into the port of Rotterdam, which is the largest in Europe, takes something of the order of three pieces of paper. Unless anything unusual happens, you’re in and out. To get a ship into Lagos harbour takes more like 70. There are layers and layers of needless bureaucracy and corruption which line the pockets of those administering the backhanders and the chop-chop and which make unloading goods a painfully slow – and potentially dangerous – occupation. At any one time there will be up to 100 ships waiting offshore to ditch their cargos. The area in which they wait is known as the quarantine anchorage, and it was around this area that I travelled with Duncan in a small boat dwarfed by the huge vessels that were laid up here.
Immobile. Valuable. Huge chunks of metal dotted around in the ocean, some of them impressive, others barely seaworthy. Ships can remain in the quarantine anchorage for many weeks. I couldn’t help notice three ladies climbing the ladder of a ship. Duncan told me they were local prostitutes that did the rounds of the merchant vessels to service the needs of homesick sailors. Supply and demand…
I couldn’t count how many ships there were, but it was absolutely clear to me that Duncan was right. The vessels I had seen in the Gulf of Aden had at least been able to perform evasive manoeuvres, could pump jets of water at attackers and had warships such as HMS Northumberland to patrol the waters – and still they got pirated with relative ease. These vessels had none of this. They were sitting ducks, clearly vulnerable to being pirated at any moment. Indeed, just four days previously, a chemical tanker had been boarded by pirates, who had beaten up the crew, stolen their money and ripped out the radio communications system, presumably so that their victims could not raise the alarm until the pirates were safely away.
We floated around the base of a vessel called the Princess Alice, registered in Panama. It was a long way from home, and as Duncan explained was particularly vulnerable by virtue of its fairly low freeboard. It wouldn’t be too taxing to put a ladder up the side, or use a grappling hook to board the vessel. My guide explained that most attacks happen at night, the pirates using the cover of darkness to approach the ships unseen and go about their business. The smaller ships were easier to hit, he told me, because they wouldn’t necessarily have 24-hour watches, and some of the bigger ships took the precaution of waiting much further out to sea, some of them not even anchored so that they could drift up and down and make it just a little bit
more difficult for the pirates.
As we continued to tour the quarantine anchorage, people looked down on us from the decks of their ships. They could see the cameras we had trained on them, and I could tell that many of them were extremely edgy about that. They didn’t like being filmed. They didn’t like anyone taking an interest in them. I couldn’t say why, but equally I couldn’t help reminding myself that transporting goods by sea is a line of business that offers more opportunity for criminality than almost any other. Just because some of these ships were vulnerable to pirate attacks, that didn’t mean they were entirely on the straight and narrow themselves.
I asked Duncan why it was that Nigeria imported so much. Why didn’t it have any kind of manufacturing industry? He explained that it was all down to oil. When the country discovered that it was oil rich, it also discovered that it was easier to earn money from that industry than any other. ‘They let the farms go,’ he told me. ‘They let the plantations go. In the end the Nigerians had to import all these goods because they couldn’t produce them themselves, and they had the money to do it.’ And yet, if the country was so rich, why were its people so poor? It was an important question, and one that I would have answered for me over the next few days.
As part of Duncan’s guided tour of Lagos, he took us to a yacht club situated on a nearby peninsula. Drinks at the club. It sounded glamorous, but in fact the building looked like it had been built in the 1970s and was now cracking up. It felt more like an old comprehensive school than a glamorous hangout for the beautiful people. The yacht club is by a stretch of water where a river joins the ocean. You can see the brown water and the blue water mixing with each other, and they cause a wave where they meet. As the roads are so congested in Lagos, people also use boats to get around, navigating the lagoons and waterways as a means of getting from A to B. As we sat outside with our very welcome cold drinks looking out over the bustle of the water, we noticed one particular boat. It had the appearance of an old lifeboat with an outboard motor but was in fact a taxi, ferrying people round the waterways of Lagos. There must have been about 15 passengers, all of them heavily laden down with bags and belongings.
We watched it from a distance. And then, as it approached us and the fast current where the river and ocean met, it suddenly flipped over.
The boat was sinking; a lot of the passengers were struggling. The reaction from the locals was immediate and impressive. Men jumped into the water from surrounding boats and rescued all the people. A crowd of kids also jumped in. Some of them dived underneath the boat, pushing it back up; others started bailing out water quicker than it could leak into the hull so that finally it rose, phoenix-like, and righted itself. Some people then tinkered around with the engine – everything was working as it should – so the passengers got back into their taxi and off it went.
That little incident seemed to me to say a lot about Africa. If it had happened on the Thames, it would be front-page news for a week. In Nigeria they just get on with it. Far worse things happen in that part of the world, so they don’t have the inclination to hang about wringing their hands. I was also struck by how ready everybody was to help out. Nigeria certainly has a criminal underbelly, but while I was there I also saw such moments of selfless kindness that put the Nigerian people in an altogether better light. In Afghanistan I had observed how the Afghan people were brilliant at recycling and reusing things; the same was true of Nigeria. Everyone talks about how bad the Third World is at recycling – and as I was soon to find out, Nigeria had more than its fair share of environmental problems. But the truth is that in poor places nobody wants to throw anything away if it can be fixed and has some use. There was no way anyone was going to let that boat sink. It would be patched up, put to work and no doubt earn a living for its owner for a good few years to come. I think our disposable society could learn a lot from that.
It is not just merchant shipping that is under threat from piracy. Unlike the pirates of Somalia, Nigerian pirates don’t just go for big game; they hit the tiddlers too. Lagos has – or at least it had – a large deep-sea fishing fleet, but as I explored the main fishing port I saw that a large number of the trawlers had been tied up and left to rust. The world was in the middle of an economic downturn at the time, but this wasn’t an economic problem. It was a criminal one. Over the last few years pirate attacks on fishermen in these waters had increased three-fold. Many of these attacks go unreported, and as they don’t have much in the way of wider ramifications for the international community, the world’s press has pretty well ignored the issue. One report, though, tells of an attack in which the pirates boarded a ship at 1.30 a.m., shot the ship’s cook through the belly and then proceeded to eat the food that he had prepared earlier while he lay dying in agony, before looting the ship of all the money and goods they could find, including the captain’s shoes. (I told you shoes were important in poor parts of the world.) The captain went on record as saying, ‘There were attacks before, but it’s the worst now. Formerly we had hijackings and they would steal everything, but now they attack and they are shooting and taking lives.’
The statistics show this to be true: over the past four years, 298 fisherman had lost their lives to pirates. That’s more than one a week.
In response to the problem, the Nigerian Trawler Owners’ Association recalled all its ships into port and led a series of demonstrations to raise awareness – in 2008 they even blockaded Lagos itself. ‘The pirates have established a republic in a republic,’ they announced. ‘They have their own commander in chief. You have to pay to be allowed to fish. You will be given their flag before you are allowed to fish. They are a country of their own.’
The threat from pirates was so immediate and acute that we could find nobody willing to talk to us on the record about it. One man, though, agreed to be interviewed on the strict proviso that we didn’t reveal his identity. He ran a fleet of 69 vessels operating out of the port of Lagos – shrimping boats, there to take advantage of the fact that the waters around Nigeria supply some of the best and most abundant shellfish in the world. His business, and the livelihoods of the men he employed, was being crippled by the effects of these attacks.
I asked him how often his 69 vessels came into contact with pirates.
‘It’s more or less a daily affair,’ he told me.
So when was the last time one of his vessels was attacked?
‘This week I’ve had twelve.’
Sounded more than daily to me. I wondered what had happened to the crews of these trawlers.
‘They’ve beaten them up. I’ve had four or five of them hospitalized. You see, the people come on board with guns, or they come shooting. Whether they do anything to you or not, they are traumatized and I am traumatized.’ Having been shot at a few times myself, I could well believe it. ‘I am scared to send off my vessels,’ he continued. ‘I normally don’t have so many vessels in port.’
It was true. His trawlers were lined up in the water, neat and useless. Elsewhere in the port I had seen a substantial number of vessels in a state of run-down disrepair, now just rusting hulls. Some of them had been left to rot in the saltwater; others had been plundered for scrap and spare parts. It was clear that no one was ever going to move these boats from the port of Lagos. They’d just be left to sink into the harbour. I couldn’t help wondering if, thanks to the attention of the pirates, this was the fate that awaited my interviewee’s fleet.
I wanted to know if he thought the pirates attacking his ship were just opportunist criminals, or if they were a bit more organized than that. He shook his head. ‘They come in boats with bulletproof vests.’
Body armour?
‘Yeah, body armour. They’ve got enough fuel supply to remain 40 miles offshore.’
That sounded to me like a gang that knew what it was doing.
‘No place is safe,’ the trawler owner told me. He explained that when a trawler is travelling with its nets down, it moves very slowly – around two and a half knots –
and its freeboard is only about eight feet high. ‘You’re a sitting duck.’
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that phrase used in Lagos, and I was beginning to understand just what a problem piracy was in this town.
I’d heard a lot about pirates, but I was still no closer to speaking to one. Trouble was, I wasn’t the only person who wanted to catch up with these people – who, for good reasons, didn’t want to be caught up with. Even more problematically, they have a very good place to hide. The maze of waterways that surrounds Lagos is the perfect environment for them. It’s huge, complicated and nigh-on impossible to police. Finding pirates among the labyrinth of backwaters and miles of open ocean was not an easy task for the authorities, and it wasn’t going to be an easy task for us.
We hadn’t yet got an in with a pirate, but we had received word that one of their victims was willing to talk to us. His name was Billy Graham (no relation), an American who had been in the oil business since 1991. He made his living working for a company that supplied machinery to oil platforms off the Nigerian coast. During the working week he and his colleagues lived in a gated community near the port. Not luxurious exactly, but a far cry from the pronounced poverty that exists literally just over the wall. In their downtime, however, they travelled up to a beach residence, where they could chill out away from the bustle and the dirt of Lagos.
It was a hot, uncomfortable journey of about four hours up into the network of channels behind Lagos. As we travelled, I noticed a lot of what are known as sand barges. These are long, thin boats, very low in the water. Men dive from these boats with an empty bucket, down to the bottom, where they fill their bucket with sand and bring it back to the surface. There’s a global demand for sand, and it has to be collected somehow. These men are out there from dawn till dusk. That’s what I call a tough way to make a living. If I ever find myself moaning about my day, I think of the sand barges of Nigeria and it puts things in perspective.