Twenty-four-year-old Fatuma Mohamed, originally from Djibouti, was content being the wife of a fisherman in Puntland, Somalia. But ever since her husband and many of his fellow fishermen turned to piracy for a living, she has felt ‘imprisoned in a nightmare’. She doesn’t want to live under criminal rule, but has no choice: for the past few years, the pirates, among them her husband, have ruled this region with an iron fist. Whilst she recognizes that pirates bring in a lot of money, also into her own household, she still condemns the practice. “Neither our religion nor our culture allows it”, she says. “But I can’t leave. My husband will come after me and kill me.” In contrast, local grandmother, Zeynab Abdi (58), loves the pirates. They help her, she says, take care of her four grandchildren who have been orphaned in Somalia’s decades-long civil war. “Life is better now that pirates are here”, she says. “When they get money, I can feed my grandchildren.’ Going round the neigbourhood in Eyl to find news about newly hijacked ships in East Africa’s waters is now part of Zeynab Abdi’s morning routine after prayers.
At the other coast of Africa, in Benin’s Porto Novo harbour area, semi-skilled electrician, Justin Godonou (35) similarly has kind feelings towards his benefactor, oil smuggler, Joseph Midodjiho. Godonou is one of the hundreds who carry oil cans, brought in by Midodjiho’s boats from the towns on the border with oil-rich Nigeria, to the latters’ warehouses on the shore. It is dirty work and the odour of petrol during this activity is so sharp that it is difficult to breathe. The smuggled petrol, which has not passed through petrol station filters, is a heavy pollutant. The Benin Department of Environment says that in the capital, Cotonou, alone, 83 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 36 tonnes of volatile hydrocarbons are being spewed out daily as a consequence of the use of illegal petrol.
But Godonou and his fellow workers are happy. ‘I earn CFA 50 per can (about 10 US cents), sometimes up to CFA 3000 (US $ 6) in one night,’ he smiles. Charlotte Medji, who lives nearby, adds that this is good income. ‘I can feed my family with that. When my children come and help, we make even more.’
In neighbouring Nigeria, in the oil rich Niger Delta, locals who feel abandoned by the government and robbed by the oil companies, embraced the rebels who attack oil company installations. “This community used to farm but now the soil in the province has been damaged by oil spills”, says Chief Amaka James Ogona (74), headman of the small Olugbobiri kingdom within Nigeria’s Bayelsa State. “The companies only agreed to give something back to the communities after the militants started attacking them.” Thanks to militants activity, Olugbobiri now has a more or less acceptable road (built by militants and financed by the multinational oil company, AGIP, as a peace offering) and villagers are regularly given cash for school fees for their children.
The above three case studies were conducted by the Forum for African Investigative Reporters (FAIR), a network of investigative journalists spread over 35 African countries. Based on the case studies and on a simultaneous crowd-sourcing exercise from within its own network, FAIR has come to the conclusion that ‘criminal development’, whether welcomed or despised, is a real factor in Africa and that its economic power, in some cases, surpasses government or international developmental programmes. The most staggering example is that of the Somali pirates, who, according to a FAIR estimate, bring three times more money into the local economy than the Somali Puntland government and up to ten times more than international developmental programmes in the region. In Benin, the Department of Trade itself estimates that 70 % of the economy depends on illegally imported petrol.
Other cases observed by FAIR are those of a small community in Nigeria, Oghara and the DRC’s Lubumbashi, that have become hubs of economic activities, with roads, markets, hotels and universities, thanks to their respective local governors –both of whom are formally accused of illegal activities and corruption. And in Ivory Coast, FAIR found, even farmers are turning to crime, since growing illegal marihuana is now a much more tempting prospect than farming the traditional cocoa and coffee crops, which are taxed to suffocation by the local political elite.
Internet cafés and fresh fish in Somalia
Quoted in the FAIR report, Somali shopkeeper, Sugule Dahir, is unapologetic about his dependency on pirates. ‘There are many shops now. Internet cafés and telephone bureaus have opened. People in this area are happier than they were before piracy.’ Twenty-six-year-old Anab Farah is a caterer of choice for the hostages the pirates hold in various locations. She prepares the three daily meals per hostage, handing them over to the hostages’ guardians as take aways. ‘The pirates are important to my work. Many days, I earn four hundred American dollars. I am planning to buy a car very soon,’ says Farah, before breaking into a song that is popular in Eyl these days: ‘ya kale, ya kale oo Somalidu dandeeda kafinkara oo aan aheyn burcaat badhet’:‘who else thinks about our plight, as Somalis, other than the pirates.’
“We pump money into the region’s economy’, says proud pirate, Abdullah Abdi (no relation to Zeynab Abdi). “When we hijack ships, we re-stock on essentials, buy goats for meat and khat (a mildly narcotic herb, ed.) from the residents.” Abdi and his colleagues have also invested in houses and office buildings, which are shooting up along Eyl’s coast line.
Many of the estimated 1500 pirates in the region are former fishermen who turned to piracy after commercial international fishing depleted the coastal fish stocks. Others used to work as bodyguards and militias for Somalia’s many warlords and politicians. As pirates, they have captured dozens of vessels and hundreds of hostages, earning millions of dollars in ransom. Though they rule by force and have a penchant for marrying the most beautiful –and often very young- local girls, a majority of locals appreciate them for revitalizing the area economically and for ‘patrolling’ the coast line. Says pirate child bride, Halima Hassan, 15: ‘The pirates are coast guards. Foreign ships have littered, polluted and depleted fish in our waters for ages. Somebody must guard them for us.’
Halima, who professes to be happy with the wealth she has found with her new 70 year old pirate husband, has a point. After the depletion of fish stocks in East Africa’s coastal waters by foreign commercial trawlers, -one of the causes of young fishermen abandoning their nets and turning to piracy in the first place- fish are returning to the East African coastal waters.
According to the World Peace Foundation, – an international think-tank bringing together scholars, diplomats, lawyers, military officers and maritime partners-, the shipping industry is losing more than US$100 million a year through hijackings. The losses from ransom alone could amount to half or more of that amount. Local sources told FAIR that one band of pirates, -the father-and-son empire of Mohamed Hassan ‘Afweyne’ and Abdikadir Abdi, that operates from central Somalia-, hijacked seven ships in 2009 alone. (The sources were able to name five of the ships and the dates). If ransom payments, as is estimated, vary between US $ 100,000 and US $ 10 million, with an average of US $ 1 million per ransom, the amount paid in ransom to this band of pirates in 2009 alone, could be as high as US $ 7 million.
According to the UN Monitoring Group on Piracy, there are at least seven such syndicates, bringing the possible yearly profits from piracy in Somalia up to close to US $ 50 million. In comparison: development aid projects in Somalia in 2009 by the UK and the US, in the field of employment creation, agriculture and livestock, amounted to no more than US $ 5 million and the total Puntland government budget in the same year amounted to US $ 17,6 million. Pirates are so clearly the more powerful economic force in the region, that the government itself has started to partake from pirates’ earnings. According to the UN Monitoring Group, (in its March 10, 2010 report), “over 30 percent of ransom payment was retained by Puntland government officials”.
The smuggler economy
In Benin, the Department of Trade itself estimates that 70 to 80 percent of all fuel imports are smuggled. Moreover, the informal economy, that largely depends on the illegal petrol trade is said to count for 70 % of the entire Beninese economy. Smuggler Joseph Midodjiho, in addition to providing employment for an estimated 600 people in the petrol trade alone, operates a motorbike courier transport enterprise that employs another few hundred couriers, as well as a micro-loan scheme through the support of which another few hundred women have accessed support to start small bakeries.
Benin Department of Trade Director, Claude Allagbe, when interviewed by FAIR, admitted that the formal economy could not do without the informal sector and that the government has opted to ‘work with’ the informal sector rather than ‘confront’ it. Allagbe, when asked to comment on the FAIR finding that prominent petrol smugglers were donors of the governing party in Benin, said that, he too, had seen ‘members of the government pointed out as traffickers’ at a meeting with smugglers at the Department of Home Affairs.
Nigeria’s formal budget: big but useless
Militant leaders’ ‘Boyloaf’ and ‘Africa’s’ cash deliveries to the Olugbobiri village folk are never more than US $ 25000,- : practically nothing when compared to the Nigerian Delta State provincial budget, that amounted to more than US $ 1 billion in the period between 1999 and 2007. The Nigerian government could still have had much more money at its disposal if militant had not engaged in sabotage. A presidential committee tasked with the design of a master plan for the Niger Delta reported last year that the government had lost US $ 20.7 billion in oil revenue due to militant activities in the first seven months of 2009 alone.
Then again, the villagers of Olugbobiri and similar areas have not benefited from the state budgets that, on paper, were meant to bring roads, health, education and justice to the area. The government did not even maintain a water project and a clinic that had been built by the oil company, AGIP as a peace offering to the rebels. “Part of the deal was that AGIP will build the projects and our government would ensure the follow-up”, says Chief Ogona. “But that did not happen.”
The fact that many African state machineries simply do not seem able to use their budgets to deliver services and development seems to be the underlying factor in many cases of ‘criminal development’. In Nigeria, the corrupt governor who used state moneys to develop his hometown, was seen –and, as far as FAIR could ascertain when it compared him to a number of his colleagues, rightly so- as better than governors who had not been accused of corruption, but who had brought no such development to any town or area in the region they governed.
On the other hand, banditry negatively affects developing state structures. Kenya, for example, is unhappy with the vast amounts of illegal money that piracy has brought into the country from neighbouring Somalia. For not only Puntland has experienced cash injections into its economy: Nairobi’s Eastleigh suburb –new home to thousands of Somali refugees-, too, is booming. The boom provides employment to ‘hundreds of youths’, in the words of a happy local manager interviewed by FAIR, who added that this was ‘all pirates’’ investment. Official estimates say there is between US $1.2 billion and US $2.05 billion floating in Kenya’s informal economy.
However, the Kenyan government is concerned about the effects of money laundering and tax evasion. “We suspect that some of the money that is being collected in piracy is being laundered through the purchase of property (in Kenya)”, says Kenyan government spokesman, Alfred Mutua. And indeed, property prices in Nairobi have shot up as a result. It has become difficult for Kenyans of medium level income to afford buying, or even keeping, their own houses. In Eastleigh, Kamau wa Ngige says he has been forced to put up notice boards that his plot is not for sale. “Pirates want to buy everything in the area. A few years ago, a plot cost between Ksh 3-4 million (US $ 37 000 – US $ 50 000) but now it costs between Ksh 10-12 million (US $ 124 000 – US $ 149 000); all because of the easy money pirates come with”, Kamau said. “I wonder why they are still roaming freely in our country. They should all be behind bars.”
But even in Kenya, a scenario whereby the state takes economic development firmly into its own hands and metes out justice efficiently to transgressors, looks like a long way away. For now, the conclusion that, for many African citizens, staying away from the state, actively working against it, or simply looting it, provides more food on the table than interacting with it, seems inescapable.
Source: Forum for African Investigative Reporters (FAIR)
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