Introduction
In the face of dwindling resources for low-income countries in Africa, political leaders and economic planners have turned their attention to the ocean economy to boost their countries’ economic wealth and bolster foreign policy. This pursuit may be stifled by prevailing primitive accumulation by the political elite and capitalist multinationals plundering resources on the continent. The ocean’s capital assets have attracted mercantilist behaviour from African states attempting to maximise ownership of living aquatic resources (fish stocks and plant marine organisms), non-living resources (offshore oil and gas, deep-sea and seabed mining, and marine salt harvesting) and ecosystems (the continued interaction between living and non-living environments). Africa’s maritime domain comprises 38 coastal states (70% of the 54 sovereign countries), along with five major island states: Cape Verde, Mauritius, Seychelles, Comoros, and São Tomé and Principe. It spans 13 million square kilometres of exclusive economic zones (EEZs), which allow each country exclusive rights to fishing, oil drilling, and seabed mining as defined by the United Nation’s Convention on the Law of the Sea, and territorial seas with 16.83 million square kilometres of continental shelf, with countries’ jurisdiction limited to only the seabed.1 So far, 90% of the continent’s international trade conducted at sea, and fishing, contribute to the food and nutritional requirement of more than 200 million people (FAO 2014b).
It has been often assumed that the ocean economy is directly beneficial to only coastal states, but the African Union (AU) now realises that sea and ocean deep-mining represent a new frontier of African renaissance from which even the 16 landlocked countries could benefit (UNECA 2016).2 Landlocked countries that account for 40% of the African population are economically disadvantaged because of the higher cost of import and export through neighbouring coastal states. Nevertheless, regional integration and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’s provisions on the principles guiding deep-sea mining offer them opportunities to harness their Blue Economy potentials.
The global shift of attention from the green economy to the new concept of the Blue Economy arose from the deliberate efforts of developing coastal states. The small island and developing coastal states have the advantage of mineral resources in vast sea space in the EEZs that could be harnessed for economic development, but are disadvantaged in technology and other critical land resources that non-island continental countries capitalise on. At the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2012, many coastal countries rather pushed for the comparatively advantageous perspective of the Blue Economy concept as more applicable to them in view of the ocean assets. Against this background, it is essential to put in perspective the Blue Economy paradigm and explore contradictions inherent in the potentials and challenges in the African situation.
Blue Economy paradigm
Humans live on a predominantly blue planet. The oceans cover 72% of the earth’s surface. The oceans and seas support human life by absorbing carbon dioxide, regulating global climate and temperatures and recycling nutrients (UN 2014, 2). The oceans and seas provide the means of transport for 80% of global trade (UNCTAD 2012). The World Bank (2017, 4–5) defines the Blue Economy as the sustainable utilisation of ocean resources for economic growth and improved livelihoods and jobs, while preserving the health of the oceans’ ecosystem(s). However, this definition risks overlooking the limits of the financial, technological, policy and operational capacities of African coastal states, and promotes prescriptions to perpetuate Western capitalist exploitative interests in weak economies. The Blue Economy conceptualises the oceans and the sea as developmental spaces for coastal and small island countries to integrate into national planning and action, in the areas of sustainable conservation, fishing resources, oil and mineral wealth extraction, marine transport, sustainable energy production and bio-prospecting (Zhu 2014, 3). It is also seen as a platform for numerous policies that will promote social inclusion by factoring women and youth into national development planning, especially the rural poor that are involved in artisanal fishing. The framework is in sync with the vision of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals and the Green Economy, as it focuses on improving social equity and welfare, as well as managing environmental risks with low-carbon and resource-efficiency policies (UNEP n.d.). The critical issue is that in the face of the rentier economy and corrupt linkages between foreign firms and local elites, African countries stand on rocky ground in regard to reaping the benefits of the ocean economy.
Principally though, the Blue Economy offers to developing states with coastlines a wide range of opportunities in addressing issues of food security, as one billion people in the developing world depend on seafood for their primary source of protein (SDG 2013). There are many cases of unsustainable fisheries in African coastal and sea waters making it difficult to manage the proportion of overexploited, depleted or recovering stock. Opportunities offered by the Blue Economy paradigm can be seen in the areas of shipping and port operations, increased prospecting from offshore fields, and marine biotechnology processes in the development of new pharmaceutical discoveries, as well as sub-marine mining to exploit mineral deposits on the seabed (Hunt and Vincent 2006, 57). To date, mineral exploitation in Africa is largely in the hands of foreign firms, with almost non-existent benefits for the local inhabitants because of corrupt political and economic elites in many countries, who have entrenched a culture of political exclusion and economic marginalisation of the populace, with negative consequences for the well-being of the coastal population who depend on the waters for survival and face the sad spectacle of their environment being ravaged by pollution and soil degradation.
International legal frameworks
The oceans and seas are governed by various legal frameworks. The dominant international legal framework is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) of 1982, otherwise referred to as the Constitution of the High Seas. UNCLOS is the legal mainframe that defines the rights and obligations of states in the oceans and seas, including the specifications for the various maritime zones of jurisdiction and corresponding rights and obligations (UN 1982). Strategically, UNCLOS defines states’ freedom of navigation and maritime boundaries as 12 nautical miles for the territorial sea, a contiguous zone of 24 nautical miles, and 200 nautical miles from the shore for their EEZ. The World Bank (2017, 7) opined that UNCLOS, together with its implementing agreements – the 1994 Agreement relating to the implementation of Part XI of UNCLOS and the 1995 United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement – provide the legal platform to regulate activities in the oceans and seas. Part XI of UNCLOS espouses principles for the responsible exploration of the seabed, while the UN Fish Stocks Agreement lays down rules for the coordinated management of international fisheries.
Other international treaties are the 1988 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (SUA) which criminalises threats to the shipping industry and seafarers; the 2000 UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (CTOT) that espouses protocols for transnational organised crimes in the maritime sphere, namely trafficking in people, smuggling of migrants and trafficking in arms; and the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which provides the principles for combating drug trafficking and money laundering. There is also the 2009 UN Food and Agriculture Port State Measures Agreement, targeted at fighting the growing cases of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. In addition, African coastal countries are signatories to the 1995 United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement. However, the levels of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in African coastal waters raise doubts as to the effective implementation of the provisions of the legal instrument as regards the maritime activities and inspection of foreign fishing vessels in the continent.
Sub-Saharan Africa in perspective
The African continent is also richly endowed with onshore natural resources. For decades, resource availability has fuelled economic stagnation, even in crude oil- and mineral-rich countries such as Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon, Gabon, Sierra Leone and South Sudan. This has arisen largely from the political elite’s preference for a rentier economic structure, with foreign firms’ exploitation of the natural resources as well as the pursuit of prebendalism and economic marginalisation of the populace. The continent’s penchant for intra- and inter-state violence underpins elite economic interests and allows them to control and profit from natural resources. Bearing in mind this onshore reality, the pursuit of the Blue Economy, as propounded by international agencies, may also concentrate the economic wealth of ocean assets from offshore drilling, fisheries and mining, in the hands of the same political elite, to the exclusion of the general populace.
The AU has not been able to address the serious economic malaise in resource management for the benefit of the majority on the continent. Yet, it has, in the meantime, designed a framework for the development of a Blue Economy in the continent for the exploitation of maritime resources. The AU, in 2014, approved and adopted the ‘2050 Africa’s integrated maritime strategy (2050 AIM strategy)’ (AU 2012) to provide a common framework for member states’ maritime policies, governance and activities for economic viability and sustainable development. The African Charter on Maritime Security, Safety and Development in Africa, otherwise referred to as the Lomé Charter, was adopted in 2016, which changes the status of the 2050 AIM strategy to that of a legally binding treaty. The Blue Economy approach in the African maritime domain is supposed to encourage social inclusion in order to cater for the interests of marginalised women, youth and physically challenged people, but that is unlikely in view of Africa’s existing economic structural imbalances.
At the sub-regional level are two major maritime governance efforts– the Yaoundé Code of Conduct in the Gulf of Guinea, and the Djibouti Code of Conduct in the Western Indian Ocean, further strengthened by the Jeddah Amendment. The Yaoundé Code of Conduct, signed in 2013 by 25 countries in the West and Central Africa sub-regions, provides a framework to enhance maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea through information sharing and collaborative security operations. The Yaoundé Code of Conduct makes provision for two regional coordination centres – the Regional Centre for Maritime Security in West Africa (CRESMAO) and the Regional Centre for Maritime Security in Central Africa (CRESMAC) – embedded in the regional economic institutions, namely the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS).
For the East African sub-region, the Djibouti Code of Conduct, adopted in 2009 to fight piracy in the Western Indian Ocean, was strengthened in January 2017 with the Jeddah Amendment to boost maritime security coordination. The Djibouti Code of Conduct has three collaborative information centres at Sana’a (Yemen), Mombasa (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) for East African coastal states along the Western Indian Ocean. However, the Djibouti Code of Conduct does not have the regional institutional leverage of its counterpart in ECOWAS, as the code of conduct is yet to be embedded in the policies of the regional economic institutions. Within the framework of the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC’s) ‘Industrialization and roadmap strategy’ (2015–2063), focusing on developing a regional value chain, South Africa is committed to Operation Phakisa, launched in 2014 to harness its ocean economy by creating a network of marine protected areas to take advantage of the strategic East–West cargo traffic in revenue and create jobs. Mozambique, which has the third largest coastline in the continent, intends to boost its coastal tourism industry to generate about 350,000 jobs, while Namibia is committed to its coastal assets, especially seabed mining of mineral resources (SADC 2017).
Critical challenges
The development of the Blue Economy in sub-Saharan Africa is blighted by several bottlenecks, which include the following critical issues.
Ungoverned maritime spaces
Africa’s maritime domain is characterised by spaces ungoverned by coastal and island sovereign states – that is, vast sea domains lacking national security cover or defined policies to harness the assets. Piracy, insurgents and terrorists have made Africa’s oceans and seas unsafe, and the critical volatile regions are the Gulf of Guinea, the Horn of Africa and the Mediterranean Sea. These three locations off the coasts of Nigeria, Somalia and Libya have the common denominator of high insecurity with criminal actors who act with total disregard to marine and other laws (Vreÿ 2017, 2–3). Somalia has the longest coastline in the continent of about 3000 kilometres and ocean territory stretching about 120 kilometres from the coastline, while Libya and Nigeria have coastlines of 1770 and 850 kilometres respectively.
A recent International Maritime Bureau (IMB) (2020, 5) report indicated that the Gulf of Guinea has now overtaken Somalia and the Horn of Africa as the piracy hotspot and critically the most dangerous maritime trade route in the world. Between 2015 and September 2019, there were 226 incidents of actual and attempted piracy and armed robbery attacks on ships in Africa, with 210 cases in the Gulf of Guinea. The report detailed 119 incidents of piracy and armed robbery attacks against ships in the Gulf of Guinea: 43 actual attacks on ships, along with 10 attempted cases, and significantly high incidences of crew kidnappings and hostage taking. In the Gulf of Guinea, Nigeria’s coastal waters account for more than half of the actual and attempted attacks on ships and their crews, making Nigeria’s waters highly dangerous trade routes.
Weak security or weak operational cover of the maritime space has promoted the scenario of armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. As at 2016, the continent was the most war-torn region globally, with 1039 armed clashes in 10 coastal states, especially around major coastal ports and maritime infrastructure (Sundberg and Melander 2013). Insurgent activities and armed robbery and piracy, especially through the seas, are significant means of funding armed conflicts. This has been the situation in the Gulf of Guinea, with the armed conflicts in the crude oil-rich Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and Mali, as well as violence in the Horn of Africa (Daxecker and Prins 2017, 215). The high propensity of weak governance in the African maritime domain has encouraged the flows and proliferation of small and light weapons, with more than 100 million of them in circulation in the continent (Philip and Moses 2013, 16): the AU has blamed about five million fatalities in Africa since 1950 on ease of access to small and light weapons (ACCORD 2015, 15).
In pursuit of the development of a strong Blue Economy, the AU’s Agenda 2063 has labelled Vision 2020 as the year of ending wars on the continent, and ‘Silencing the guns’ by curtailing the accessibility of the weapons by unauthorised persons and criminal gangs (ACCORD 2015, 14–15). Vision 2020 is threatened by coastal states’ weaknesses in policing their coastlines. Many coastal states do not have trained coast guards dedicated to maritime law enforcement, and rely on the use of their navies which are not well trained in maritime trade and merchant vessel inspection skills (Vogel 2009, 2). For example, Liberia, which has an EEZ larger than the landmass of the UK, has only a 50-member coastguard, while 13 states have fewer than 10 vessels each to provide security over their large maritime spaces. South Africa’s navy has taken the lead under Operation Copper since 2011 to put together a regional maritime security strategy for SADC, whose member states with coastlines are exposed to violations of maritime space and lack operational capacities regarding surveillance. For instance, South Africa provides airborne and maritime platforms for the joint patrol of the Mozambique Channel, and, in order to sustain the operation between 2020 and 2021, the South African National Defence Force intends to spend an extra R154 million (DefenceWeb 2020).
Crisis of illegal fishing
The fishing crisis in African waters has three dimensions: illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The International MCS Network (2014, 1) described illegal fishing as occurring in the jurisdiction of a coastal state without appropriate permission or in violation of applicable laws; unreported fishing is that which is not fully recorded or reported to authorities; and unregulated fishing is that occurring in coastal states’ waterfronts and seas indiscriminately, without plans for resource management and sustainability. As a result of the fishing crisis in the West, East and Central African sub-regions, two-thirds of stocks are fully exploited and the remainder are overexploited (FAO 2014a, 2). Western Africa has been described as the epicentre of IUU fishing on the continent, as the vast coastline contains some of the most economically important fishery locations in the world (Daniels et al. 2016). No less than 37% of fish caught off West African and 18% off East African coastlines are illegal or unreported (Agnew et al. 2009, 3), while IUU fishing deprives in particular five West Africa coastal states – Mauritius, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Sierra Leone – of about US$2.3 billion yearly (Doumbouya et al. 2017, 5).
In the western axis, large industrial trawlers from faraway Asian and EU countries overfishing the seas and coastlines of sub-Saharan African countries, become instrumental in the frustratingly low catches of indigenous artisanal fishers. (MRAG 2010, 9). Stable Seas3 (2020, 10) reports that foreign vessels deploy larger sets of gear, crowd out smaller artisanal boats, and deplete fisheries’ resources. Daniels et al. (2016, 4–5) state that the abundant stocks of high-value fish act as a magnet for industrial fishing vessels to invade African coastal state waters that have long coastlines, but limited resources and mechanisms to monitor and track activities of fishing vessels in their EEZs. EU fishing vessels target fragile fish species in African sea spaces, and undermine access agreements. The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy of 1983 was designed with the objective of ensuring that declining fish stocks are exploited responsibly to protect the interests of the industry, consumers and the coastal countries. However, some of these fleets engage in fraudulent re-flagging to evade sanctions, or obtain private licences in a nearby country to evade taxes in the African states off whose shores they are working. No doubt, corruption remains a major hindrance to the successful implementation of maritime or fishing regulations in African coastal states. For example, the report published by Stable Seas (2020) indicates that foreign vessels intercepted in coastal waters off Cameroon, Nigeria, Gabon, Benin Republic, and Equatorial Guinea offered bribes to local elite and ports officials to circumvent maritime regulations. The corrupt practice undermines the access agreements with African coastal countries, and the situation encourages protection of criminal fishing networks. Another example is a high-profile fisheries corruption case in Namibia in 2019 leading to the arrest of two former ministers in the country (Kleinfeld 2019).
Insecurity of tourism
Coastal tourism potential has been hugely ignored by African states. The maritime insecurity in the Gulf of Guinea has robbed several countries in West Africa of revenue from potential tourism. The African Development Bank (2015) reports that West African coastal states fail to reach their tourism targets due to maritime piracy and armed robbery. Gabon and Gambia both have vast potential for tourism, but neither has been able to adequately leverage on their beautiful beaches and other rich coastal natural resources because of maritime insecurity.
Similarly, the piracy off the coast of Somalia depleted East African countries’ economies in the late 2000s. Kenyan cruise ship tourism dropped by 95% in 2008 following hijacking and kidnappings (VOA News 2017), and the Seychelles suffered a loss of US$12 million in 2018 (Haywood and Spivak 2012).
Maritime disputes undermining governance
Maritime governance of African waters is further weakened by serious boundary disputes between coastal and island states over EEZs and ocean resources. These disputes, some of which are under adjudication by international bodies, have further served to hinder African states’ cooperation in maritime governance as well as in promotion of the Blue Economy in the continent. The pursuit of states’ national interests seems to undermine the provisions of the 1982 UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. The Convention clearly defined coastal and island states’ territorial sea from the shore, but the search for offshore hydrocarbon deposits and exploration has created conflictual relationships among African states.
In 2017 there were seven ongoing maritime disputes, spread thus: the Gulf of Guinea (Angola and DRC, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, as well as Equatorial Guinea and Gabon); Horn of Africa (Somalia, Djibouti and Yemen; Eritrea and Djibouti; as well as Kenya and Somalia); and the Indian Ocean (Comoros, France and Madagascar).
The dispute between Angola and the DRC is over national boundaries around offshore crude oil blocks. Both countries have approached the UN for international arbitration as Angola insists on the offshore oil resources, while the DRC argues that the oil blocks were positioned or aligned to restrict the DRC’s access to the sea. The Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire delimitation of maritime boundaries started in 2007 following discovery of offshore hydrocarbons by Ghana. The dispute was resolved in 2017 by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in favour of Ghana. The dispute between Equatorial Guinea and Gabon since 1972 has been over the extensive oil fields around the islands of Mbanié, Cocotiers and Congas in Corisco Bay. Exploration of the oil resource is on hold, and the UN has been invited to settle the dispute.
The dispute between Kenya and Somalia is also over boundaries around offshore oil blocks located around their EEZs. While Kenya has proposed a maritime boundary based on a straight line taken from the land boundary between both states, Somalia has requested that the boundary be derived from the median, relying on the provisions of Article 15 of UNCLOS (UN 1982). The dispute, between Somalia, Djibouti and Yemen in the Gulf of Aden, pending before the UN Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea, is over the EEZ declared by Somalia in 2014 that included the islands of Socotra, Sambad and Abd al Kuri. The dispute between Eritrea and Djibouti is over the strategically located island of Doumeira adjacent to the mouth of the Rea Sea, a busy shipping lane. Eritrea has reportedly clashed with Djibouti, and even Yemen, over the Hamish islands. An EEZ of 48,350 kilometres is the contention between Comoros, France and Madagascar. The disputes in the continent indicate, among other things, that multinational firms encourage local political collaborators to push their frontiers into controversial sea areas in order to seek profits for themselves and the elite in such countries. For example, the maritime boundary dispute between oil-rich Gabon and Equatorial Guinea over the 30-hectare island of Mbanié is being pushed by the Gabonese arm of Royal Dutch Shell that has prospected and found commercial quantities of crude oil and natural gas in the Igoumou block (Offshore 2006). Furthermore, the maritime dispute referred to above between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire concerning the TEN oilfield, operated by London-listed Tullow Oil, led to a halt in development of the project; the intense pressure to pursue oilfield exploration and production encouraged Ghanaian political leaders to pursue the matter at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Reuters 2017; Uzuegbunam 2015). Besides, in the Gambia and Senegal, Norway-based African Petroleum in 2017 lodged Requests For Arbitration (RFAs) with the US-based International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) to protect its offshore licences offered to London-based BP and Paris-listed Total, following the change of political leadership in the countries (Offshore Energy 2017).
Conclusion
Despite the extensive EEZs of many coastal and island states in Africa, with huge marine resources, no single African state has the capacity to monitor the maritime space under her jurisdiction as approved under UNCLOS. There is urgent need for more collaborative security operations to ensure maritime security, especially in the highly volatile Gulf of Guinea, a global busy shipping lane on the western edge of the continent. Poor maritime security cover has had adverse consequences on coastal tourism potential and revenue generation, as well as depletion of fisheries and negative effects on artisanal occupation. The Yaoundé and Djibouti Codes of Conduct are necessary platforms of soft laws, but there is need for institutional frameworks to energise periodic joint patrols and operations to clear national maritime jurisdictions of piracy and armed robbery.
The prospect of social inclusive development is a distant dream for millions of Africans that depend on the coastal economy for survival. The way it is now, the Blue Economy is more likely to serve the interests of foreign firms and Africa’s political and economic elite rather than the ordinary citizenry. Foreign interests pushing Blue Economy narratives in Africa are unwilling to offer concrete assistance to boost the local capacity of African states to harness the ocean economy for the benefit of their populace. Africa’s Blue Economy portends to be another goldmine for foreign firms. Already, African states’ political and economic elites exploit weak national policies and legal instruments to corruptly offer preferential treatments to rentier and profit-seeking multinationals in offshore crude oil exploration, foreign fishing fleets and ships carrying goods to undermine the economic capacity of African states. The ocean assets of African states may go the same way as the onshore resources in the continent in terms of foreign exploitation and domination with financial and technological capacity, encouraged by corrupt political elite engendering weak regulatory and institutional frameworks as well as poorly regulated coastal waters in order to perpetuate fraudulent practices for their personal economic interests.