Somali piracy in the Indian Ocean has declined quite dramatically over the past 18 months or so. But if the international community thinks it’s time to lower its guard, it should go to the Simon’s Town cemetery, South African Navy Captain Charl Coetzee suggests.
There it will find the graves of nine Royal Navy sailors killed by pirates off Zanzibar in 1892.
Coetzee, who has 10 years of sailing experience on both Africa’s east and west coasts, believes that the main cause of piracy is greed, not socio-economic deprivation. So it is a constant threat.
And the price of combating it is, therefore, constant vigilance.
Like his colleague, Rear-Admiral Rusty Higgs, Chief of Naval Staff, he believes that piracy has decreased because of the intense patrolling of the Indian Ocean, mainly by international gunboats in the north, but also by the SA Navy in the Mozambique Channel.
They were speaking at a seminar on the maritime security strategy of the Southern African Development Community at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria last week.
Coetzee was responding to Professor João Paulo Coelho, research director at Aquino de Bragança Centre for Social Studies in Maputo, who has a different view – not surprisingly, perhaps, since he is a social scientist.
He believes that the root causes of piracy are indeed poverty and marginalisation.
He warned Mozambique’s northernmost province, Cabo Delgado, bordering Tanzania, could be on the verge of breeding a new generation of home-grown pirates. This could be the result of an explosive mixture of deprivation of the local community from illegal logging and poaching of natural resources, mainly by foreigners, heavy competition to local artisanal fishers by industrial fishing trawlers and semi-industrial Tanzanian fishing boats, resettlement of communities by gas and oil companies and an influx of Somali refugees with sailing skills.
Higgs agreed that the huge offshore gas and oil industry that was about to take off there was going to be a tempting target for pirates.
It’s true, as Coetzee himself acknowledged, that if you’re a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Sailors are naturally inclined to combat piracy with gunboats and Coetzee himself has skippered the supply ship SAS Drakensberg, which has been supporting the navy frigates patrolling the Mozambique Channel.
He told intriguing stories of the navy ships pursuing suspected pirates and drug-trafficking vessels in the channel, in one of which the navy tragically lost a young sailor who drowned.
Higgs lamented the fact that the scandal surrounding the arms deal which brought South Africa new frigates and submarines, had also delayed the procurement of smaller patrol vessels badly needed if the country and the region were to properly monitor their waters. But the first of these vessels was now due to launch in 2018.
Equally, for Coelho, the “nail” is socio-economic and so his suggested remedies included a much broader approach to maritime security strategy than just gunboats and therefore the participation of a much broader range of “stakeholders” than just navies, in formulating this strategy.
In the end, these two approaches are not really competitive.
It’s common cause that Cabo Delgado and northern Mozambique in general are experiencing marginalisation. And this manifests itself in ways other than piracy, for example in the resurgence of Renamo as a military threat.
The area and the country are facing the real menace of a resource curse from the big gas and oil finds, a curse which ultimately only good governance, which has been conspicuously lacking so far, can avoid.
But the extraordinary thing, as Coetzee hinted, is that nothing very much has changed over the past two centuries, except the currency: ivory, gold and spices in the 19th century, oil in the 21st century, piracy in both.
And to complete the apparent anachronism, Higgs noted that another evil which the navy was on the lookout for in the channel was human trafficking – or “modern-day slavery”, as he put it.