Maritime economy and security: a joined-up approachPhilip Holihead It is perhaps not surprising that the two most recent outbreaks of piracy have occurred along both the east and the west coast of Africa. Although quite different in nature, they are both under-pinned by wider maritime criminality and have grown as a result of poor maritime governance pointing to wider underlying issues that extend beyond basic maritime security and are at the heart of Africa’s security and economic policies.

When Somali piracy was at its peak in 2012, the regional States of the western Indian Ocean were, with the exception of one or two, struggling not only to combat the threat posed by the spreading criminality, but also to quantify the impact. An example is that Kenya’s Maritime Authority was quantifying its losses by calculating the lost revenue in port fees from cancelled shipping including cruise ships, but nobody in the Kenyan Government was quantifying the loss in revenue from the reduction in tourists arriving on those cruise ships. Yet it was Kenya’s tourism that was to prove to be vulnerable when it took two severe body blows after tourists were kidnapped by pirates from its luxury resorts in Lamu.

It would be wrong to single out Kenya, which by no means was alone in not fully quantifying the economic risks the spread of piracy was having in the region. The Kenyan Government, like the majority of Governments in the region, viewed piracy or other types of maritime crime (e.g. armed robbery against ships and their crews, theft of ships’ entire cargoes) as being something that only affected maritime trade and was therefore the sole purview of the Maritime Authority. The kidnapping of tourists in Lamu showed that others across government also bear risk when crime occurring or emanating from the maritime space occurs within a State’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and had a significant negative impact on Kenya’s beach tourism industry.

The EEZ is a sea area that forms part of the high seas – up to 200 nautical miles from the shore – where the coastal State concerned enjoys maritime jurisdiction as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). All marine resources within the EEZ belong to the coastal State that has signed up to and ratified UNCLOS and formally declared its EEZ. In practice, other countries are prohibited from exploiting or using those marine resources without the express permission of the coastal State. In addition, oil, gas and minerals are strategic seabed resources a coastal State is entitled to exploit in accordance with UNCLOS principles and provisions. Thus it can be an area with a significant economic benefit to a State.

One critical marine resource within an EEZ is fishing resources, which are often vital for maintaining and developing food security for the coastal State concerned. Food security is a top priority of the United Nations Assembly’s agenda in the context of its decision to develop Sustainable Development Goals (SDCs), building on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Considerable income can be lost to the coastal State concerned if its fishing resources are not managed and protected. By way of illustration, estimates for 2006 show that Somalia lost about US$90m per annum and Guinea Conakry US$110m per annum to illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing (IUUF).

Tourism also is often a very important source of income but is heavily dependent on clean seas and protection from crime. However, the oversight and management of these and other resources bring into play a number of ministries with little or no coordination. In addition, there are others on the coastal edge of the EEZ who also stand to benefit from the sea in terms of economic gain, inter alia: ports, trade, oil and gas, renewable energy, and shipping.

There are therefore often a number of stakeholder ministries with the responsibility to manage the resources within the EEZ in order to increase revenue in the State’s GDP. Their responsibilities as part of the maritime economy are often less obvious to the specialised maritime community: ports are part of the maritime community, but is beach tourism? Oil and gas exploration is often considered as a separate resource driven by a separate ministry even if it takes place off-shore. There is a direct parallel between the overlap of that part of the economy generated from the sea, and that which is land based, and with the types of crime that can threaten the economy. Piracy by its definition takes place at sea, but the crime’s infrastructure, financing, and beneficiaries are all on the land. As all crime is generated by humans and all humans live on the land, why do we look at maritime crime and maritime security separately? Is it only about where the crime occurs, or is it wider than this and about where the impact of the crime hits?

There is no doubt that detecting and policing crime that occurs in the maritime space is a complex issue that requires specialist policing, legislation, justice and technology, but is that so different from other specialist crimes such as fraud which also require specialised police skills, laws, courts, and technology to be effective? Yes, the maritime space is large and sparsely populated making the cost of policing it a heavy one with a requirement for costly specialised equipment (boats) and personnel, but coastal States have other commitments in their maritime spaces that could be incorporated into the policing process: navigational safety, environmental, port control etc.

In order to decide on the extent to which a State needs to police its maritime space and incur the costs of so doing, it will need to agree what its responsibilities within the maritime space are; many States sign up to IMO conventions etc. but struggle to implement them due to a lack of resources. How does a State generate the funds to fulfil its international obligations? This is where the link between the maritime economy and the provision of maritime security comes out. A coastal State needs to identify what its maritime space is worth to the national economy in order to decide just what its policing/security forces are being asked to protect and how much of the maritime revenue it is prepared to spend on doing this. I have carefully avoided calling the police/security forces ‘maritime’ forces because at this stage of the process a State should not have decided whether the security is land or sea based only that some security is required. The cost vs benefit analysis of how to provide the right amount of security/policing can only be done after the whole economic study of the amount the maritime part of the economy actually generates.

It would seem logical for coastal States to have all-encompassing maritime strategies that quantify the value of the total maritime resource to the State and ensure that measures are firmly in place to protect the revenue stream it could generate. The prospect of revenue creation is however also where such an approach often starts to go awry, and where opportunities open up for the exploitation of the maritime space by others – both internal and external to the State.

It appears particularly difficult for States to form a cohesive government approach to maritime economic opportunities. There are too many competing interests among the stakeholders and often also an historic reluctance or inability among the security/police forces to work together. If there is to be a comprehensive approach by government to maximise the income from the maritime resource it will require considerable transparency and accountability regarding how funds are managed for the greater wealth of the State and civic society as a whole. Thus it will require inspired leadership to draw all the competing ministries and agencies together and establish and operate a transparent mechanism for the management of the maritime resource as a rational, well-thought out and focused business,

the profit from which bypasses individual ministries and goes directly into the central exchequer, which in turn is accountable to a transparent and legitimate entity.

It is this type of authoritative and transparent approach that will be required by Africa’s States if they are to maximise the opportunities offered in the African Union’s Declaration for an Integrated Maritime Strategy for Africa by 2050. The importance of the maritime domain for both coastal and inland economies in Africa should not be underestimated. Quite apart from the riches of oil, gas, minerals, fishing resources and tourism, the impact of maritime trade and the development of ports and trade routes at sea that connect these ports are vital. The world already is Africa’s trading partner and could be much more so, because the continent’s maritime domain ensures that exports such as minerals and metals, and increasingly manufactured goods, leave its shores in growing volumes while critical imports such as fuel and manufactured goods flow in.

There has been no more opportune time to take positive steps to manage States’ EEZs as maritime crime and in particular IUUF continue to undermine the continent’s maritime economy. Many of these crimes are ‘supported’ from elsewhere and can serve as drivers of conflict and instability, and are integral to the factors that have allowed piracy to return to Africa’s waters.

Lessons from piracy are there to be learned. One of the major lessons is that piracy does not randomly pop up and that when it does, it needs a combined anti-piracy and counter-piracy approach to eliminate it (Coutroubis, Kiourktsoglou & Schwartz 2012). Like most maritime crime, whilst containment at sea is important, if there are to be long-term successes the eradication of piracy will require the prolonged exertion of soft power in terms of improved economic growth and enhanced national cohesion, which will eventually make the difference.

Piracy is not the greatest threat to Africa’s maritime economy, but the factors that allow piracy to flourish around the coast of Africa are undermining the coastal States’ abilities to generate wealth from their maritime resources. These are:

Lack of overall maritime economic awareness Lack of cohesive all-government maritime economy based security plans Under-funded policing resources Poor maritime situational awareness Poor inter-agency cooperation across the land/sea boundary

It is time to break the circle and look at comprehensive government approaches for defining the worth of States’ maritime resources and allocating proportional forces to protect them, whilst at the same time using the revenue generated by proper management of the maritime resources to generate wealth and education. Perhaps only then shall we have a chance to eliminate threats such as piracy from Africa’s waters and to move forward and develop a maritime-based economy for Africa.

Philip Holihead ran the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Indian Ocean counter-piracy programme: the Djibouti Code of Conduct from 2010 until 2015. During that time he was also part of a small team advising and facilitating a Maritime Resource and Security Strategy for Somalia under the Kampala Process. Prior to that he had maritime security and counter-terrorism capacity building experience in Yemen and Cambodia with the UK Govt. Having successfully delivered the IMO’s programme he is now concentrating on providing wider consultancy on maritime crime and governance in the region.