The Nigerian Navy pursued the oil tanker MT Heroic Idun into the Gulf of Guinea. Navy officials suspected the ship of stealing oil from a Port Harcourt terminal. The tanker’s crew, mistaking the approaching naval patrol boat for pirates on that day in August 2022, reported themselves under attack and fled.
Using the tools of the Yaoundé Architecture Regional Information System (YARIS), Nigerian authorities contacted their counterparts in Equatorial Guinea, who impounded the ship when it entered their waters and held the crew as suspected thieves.
Although the crew eventually was acquitted of wrongdoing, the incident illustrates how African nations use technology and regional organizations to improve maritime domain awareness (MDA) along the continent’s heavily traveled Atlantic and Indian oceans’ coasts.
“Nigeria is a prime example of a country where investment in technology-based infrastructure has helped it to tackle threats to security and development,” analyst Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood wrote recently in The Conversation. Okafor-Yarwood has written extensively about the nexus between technology and maritime security, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea.
Nigeria is a West African maritime security leader. Among its MDA tools, the Falcon Eye system uses a network of radars, electro-optic systems and cameras to track vessel movements. Along with Falcon Eye, the Deep Blue Project includes a fleet of 19 ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, 600 coastal security personnel and a land-based Command, Control, Communication, Computer, and Intelligence Centre to collect data and respond to incidents.
Nigeria credits its effort to monitor and protect its offshore territory for a steep drop in piracy incidents and a delisting in 2022 from a public roster of the world’s piracy problem areas.
Nigeria has the capability to fund its own MDA system, but many nations cannot. Regional systems such as YARIS and its Indian Ocean analog, the Djibouti Code of Conduct, improve MDA by encouraging countries to work together to overcome their individual deficiencies.
Despite that, the systems face important challenges, such as long-term sustainability and building trust with shippers, according to former shipping executive Sam Megwa, who now oversees the Gulf of Guinea Interregional Network, which is working on ways to ensure the future of YARIS.
“We need to foster cooperation and trust,” Megwa said during an interview on Okafor-Yarwood’s podcast, “AfriCan Geopardy.” “If the maritime environment is secure, it benefits everyone.”
TECHNOLOGY AND TRUST
Africa’s 39 coastal countries are responsible for 48,100 kilometers of coastline, 13 million square kilometers of exclusive economic zones and more than 100 ports — a huge amount of territory that countries historically have struggled to patrol effectively. It’s a condition researchers refer to as “sea blindness.” The result has been decades of piracy, trafficking and other challenges to the continent’s sea-based economy.
“Oceans remain an elusive space for many coastal states due to limited capacity resulting from lack of access to infrastructure, technology and technical know-how,” Okafor-Yarwood wrote as the lead author of a study published in the journal “Marine Policy” in early 2024.
The situation has begun to change as technological advancements, including internet-based, land-based and space-based systems, give countries a better understanding of what is happening in their territorial waters.
“The evolution of MDA is intrinsically linked to the rise of technologies promising to enhance states’ surveillance capabilities,” Okafor-Yarwood and his coauthors wrote in Marine Policy.
Technology that African nations have at their disposal includes:
SeaVision: The unclassified MDA tool created in the United States in 2012 requires only an internet connection, username and password. It lets users track commercial vessels globally with data from automatic identification system (AIS) transponders developed to prevent collisions at sea. About 25 African countries use the tool.
Radar: Low-cost land-based radar systems that can see through bad weather give authorities a picture of the ships operating in their waters. However, such systems see small slices of territory at a time and cannot provide the kind of identifying information available from AIS or the vessel monitoring system.
Satellite: Satellite images cover large amounts of territory, but their low resolution makes it difficult to see small vessels. Like radar, they also fail to provide identifying information. Subscriptions can be too expensive for some countries.
Skylight: This internet-based system combines public and private satellite images and AIS data to locate ships and track them at sea with an emphasis on illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Synthetic-aperture radar: This high-cost satellite-based radar system provides higher resolution images than land-based radar and can pinpoint vessels’ position and activity. It also can track vessels that have disabled their AIS transponders — a tactic common to ships fishing illegally.
Vessel Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite: This technology detects vessels based on the light they emit, making it particularly effective against IUU fishing vessels that use lights to attract fish.
Even as maritime technology proliferates, it’s no substitute for coordination and collaboration among countries.
“The struggle to patrol is largely caused by a lack of capacity, which could be overcome if authorities would improve joint awareness through shared information,” analyst Timothy Walker wrote for the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies.
That said, information must be shared judiciously in areas where it might encourage corrupt authorities to collude with the same criminals the systems are trying to stop, according to experts.
“This creates a culture of mistrust,” Okafor-Yarwood and co-authors wrote in “Marine Policy.”
African nations already struggle to instill trust in the commercial shippers that transit their waters. Ships that suspect piracy often report first to groups such as the Malaysia-based International Maritime Bureau rather than to the nearby information centers established by the Yaoundé and Djibouti systems. In many cases, ship captains don’t believe African nations will respond effectively, according to researchers.
“It goes without saying that contacting the region first would give them the best chance of responding quickly and effectively to ships in distress,” Megwa said. “The full potential of YARIS cannot be realized unless there is that information sharing between the ships and the regional centers.”
CHALLENGES AHEAD
Collaboration in the maritime environment can overcome the limitations some nations face, particularly those where land-based insurgencies and terrorism force leaders to shift their focus away from the largely out-of-sight offshore areas. For those, the Yaoundé Architecture or Djibouti Code of Conduct can be a vital part of their effort to disrupt maritime crime.
From its founding in 2008, the Djibouti Code of Conduct became the cornerstone of international efforts to rein in piracy in the western Indian Ocean, a region that includes the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman and the Mozambique Channel, three crucial chokepoints for the global economy.
Over the next decade, the 20 signatories — 15 African and five Middle Eastern nations — and their partners reduced piracy levels to virtually zero in the region. In 2022, the International Maritime Organization delisted the Indian Ocean as an area at high risk for piracy.
Although piracy has dropped dramatically, African nations continue to face other ocean-borne challenges. Drug traffickers, for example, have made the continent a key transit route to Europe, from Brazil into West Africa and from southern Asia into East Africa. Africa’s Indian Ocean nations alone experience more than $190 million in drug trafficking each year, according to researchers Darshana M. Baruah, Nitya Labh and Jessica Greely with the Carnegie Endowment.
“The movement of drugs and terrorism are connected,” the researchers wrote in a 2023 study.
Since 2016, East African regional maritime security forces repeatedly have intercepted Iranian weapons destined for al-Shabaab and the Islamic State group in Somalia.
Africa’s Indian Ocean island nations — Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles — are responsible collectively for monitoring more than 3.8 million square kilometers of ocean, second only to Australia, making regional cooperation imperative. Madagascar is home to one of three Indian Ocean information fusion centers designed to collect data and coordinate MDA across the region.
Even as nations use technology and collaborative agreements to improve their MDA, they face important challenges going forward. Chief among those is the future of YARIS, which relies on funding from the European Union.
According to Megwa, YARIS’s future may require a combination of public and private funding to ensure the system remains sustainable. That includes finding an African location to host the system’s data center, which is in Portugal.
“There is no point in handing the system over to the region then having YARIS fail because there are other priorities,” Megwa said. “It will be very much a collaborative effort.”
The region also has a lack of trained people to take the reins of YARIS, which already struggles to get member nations to fully staff its information centers, according to researchers.
To avoid potential backsliding on marine security, Okafor-Yarwood and others say that African nations must put more attention and resources into guarding their coastal zones.
“Security technologies that focus on threat identification are only effective if law enforcement officials have the necessary resources to interdict these threats,” Okafor-Yarwood and coauthors wrote. “The role of technology in MDA and maritime security capacity is crucial and undeniable.”