JOHANNESBURG—A lack of state and industry accountability has turned the oceans around Africa into the world’s biggest transnational crime scene, according to one of South Africa’s leading crime researchers.
Carina Bruwer of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria, South Africa, told The Epoch Times that the world’s seas, which cover 70 percent of the Earth, have become central to global illicit trade and that African oceans are some of the best examples of this.
“Criminal networks are plundering marine resources, scouring shipping lanes for vessels to hijack, and traversing coastal state waters and the high seas to move commodities to distant destinations,” she said.
“Africa is situated between multiple global demand and supply markets, and that makes it a significant site of organized crime. Africa’s east and west coasts are primary narcotic transit hubs and global piracy hotspots.
“In the seas around North Africa, migrant smuggling is raging, and to the south, marine resources like abalone and rock lobster are collapsing because crime groups are decimating them.”
In the 2000s, West Africa became a “key axis” for cocaine trafficking from Latin America through countries such as Guinea-Bissau and Mali, before the drugs were smuggled to Western consumer markets, according to Ms. Bruwer, who holds a doctorate in criminology from the University of Cape Town.
“Later this spread to East Africa, to countries like Kenya, where Afghan heroin and methamphetamines are moved via the Indian Ocean,” she said.
“In recent years, South Africa has emerged as a global node of cocaine trafficking as well.”
In its latest Global Cocaine Report, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) stated that Africa’s role in the worldwide supply chain is increasing.
It stated that seizure data suggest that the role of Africa, especially West and Central Africa, as a transit zone for cocaine on its way to markets in Europe has picked up substantially since 2019.
According to the UNODC, both the total quantity seized in Africa and the number of large seizures reached record levels in 2021.
“Maritime nations in West Africa account for much of the volume of cocaine seized. But other indicators suggest a widening issue on the continent. South Africa, for example, reported a record amount of cocaine seized, raising the prospect of a rebound in the domestic market,” the report reads.
Ms. Bruwer said Brazilian crime groups are “increasingly targeting Portuguese-speaking countries like Mozambique, Angola and Cabo Verde.”
“And airports in Kenya and Ethiopia are also believed to have been targeted as ‘stopovers’ en route from Brazil to Europe,” she said.
Piracy has soared in recent years in the Gulf of Guinea, on the West African coast, replacing the Indian Ocean as the most dangerous region for seafarers globally, according to Ms. Bruwer.
“Africa’s oceans are woefully under-policed, and this fact is central to the business model of organized crime groups. African coastal states don’t have the resources and requisite skills to protect their territories from global criminal networks,” said Timothy Walker, maritime project leader at the ISS.
He told The Epoch Times that some African states are doing their best to counter a rise in crime on the seas by increasing surveillance, sometimes in cooperation with international partners and private actors.
“The shipping industry now deploys private security onboard vessels. We have nongovernmental organizations rescuing distressed migrant boats and chasing down illegal fishing vessels,” Mr. Walker said.
But this isn’t nearly enough, he noted.
“Policing the sea is difficult even for rich countries. African countries don’t have enough ships and aircraft to patrol their maritime domain,” Mr. Walker said.
He pointed out that 60 percent of the ocean forms part of the high seas, waters outside national jurisdiction.
“Say a ship on the high seas off the West African coast is flying the flag of Sierra Leone and it’s suspected it’s involved in criminal activity ... that means it’s the duty of Sierra Leonean authorities to respond,” Mr. Walker said.
“But responding requires the will to act and the ability to pursue vessels and to coordinate with other states to provide support.
“All of this is missing in Africa, so you end up putting poorly resourced law enforcement up against well-resourced organized crime groups who aren’t tied to borders or laws.”
Ms. Bruwer said criminal networks are using various methods to exploit the limited presence of law enforcement in the ocean around Africa.
One of these is what’s known as transshipment. It’s basically the ship-to-ship transfer of goods, including contraband.
“Fishing boats are transhipping illegal catches to avoid port controls, and crime groups are doing ship-to-ship oil transfers to evade sanctions. Sometimes African authorities know exactly what’s going on but they’re benefitting from the crime, so they turn a blind eye,” Mr. Walker said.
According to Stop Illegal Fishing, a global alliance of environmental groups dedicated to protecting oceans, transshipment of illicit shiploads of fish is rife in African oceans, with a lot of it perpetrated by Chinese vessels.
It described transshipment as “one of the major missing links in understanding where illegally caught fish finds its way to the market, and thus a key cause of lack of transparency in global fisheries.
On its website, Stop Illegal Fishing sets out what motivates criminals to tranship fish.
“Like high seas fishing operations in all the world’s oceans, it is more efficient for vessels catching high-value fish like tuna to stay out at sea for as long as possible. Traveling to and from port to offload their catch takes up valuable time [and fuel] that could be used for fishing,” the site reads.
“So it’s common practice for refrigerated transport vessels, commonly referred to as ‘reefers’ or ‘carriers’ to do the fetching and carrying for them.
“It’s a highly organized system—reefers arrive at a pre-arranged time and place, bringing supplies of fuel, food, bait, and even a change of crew, and take away the catch—frozen fish destined for foreign markets across the globe.”
Such transshipment is highly efficient but difficult to control, according to the group.
“If a fishing vessel offloads or transships in port it is easier to inspect and monitor, to check that the catch was legally caught, but on the high seas, this can be difficult to do,” it stated.
“Illegal fishers take advantage of this and use transshipment to ‘launder’ illegally caught fish. By mixing illegal and legal fish, the illegal fish takes on the documentation of the legal fish.
“Also, because reefers do not fish, they are often exempt from catch documentation and monitoring, creating a missing link in the chain of custody from vessel to plate.”
Stop Illegal Fishing stated that transshipment at sea also results in labor and human rights violations, “as it enables fishing vessels to remain at sea for months or even years at a time, trapping crew members on board and leaving them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.”
Mr. Walker said transshipment is also a tactic used by drug traffickers.
Ms. Bruwer said mitigating organized crime at sea is possible, as efforts to counter piracy in the Indian Ocean off the East African coast proved.
“We still see instances of piracy now and again, but nothing to the scale of what we previously saw,” she said.
“When national, regional, and international state and private actors from East Africa and the United States combined forces, piracy declined quite fast.
“Counter-piracy primarily focuses on law enforcement, but in East Africa, it has also improved criminal justice capacities on land to prosecute offenders, and it also recognizes the importance of developing local coastal communities.”
Mr. Walker said East Africa’s response to piracy highlights the importance of public-private partnerships.
“The shipping and fishing industries are the most prominent actors at sea, so they’re vital to safeguarding it,” he said. “The transnational nature of organized crime requires an equally borderless, cooperative response both on land and at sea.”
But Ms. Bruwer said that “giving life to these documents will be challenging.”
“Whatever efforts there are on combating crime on the high seas of Africa tend to focus on simply catching criminals in isolated cases, not prevention or eradication,” she said.
“Private industry and flag states are often absent from or play a minimal role in initiatives to combat maritime crimes that don’t affect them to the same extent as piracy, for example.”
Ms. Bruwer said Western nations such as the United States helped East Africa counter piracy “largely because piracy was a direct threat to the economic interests of the Global North, as it was a threat to world trade.”
Mr. Walker said: “Only when African countries begin to grasp the damage organized crime on oceans is doing to them in terms of their economies will we see real impetus against it by Africans.”
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