Nigeria again declares years of “zero piracy”, sidelining attacks on small fishers

Nigerian maritime authorities have again declared the country’s waters piracy-free — but the claim obscures a quieter, persistent violence that official statistics were never designed to count.

Dayo Mobereola, director-general of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), said this week that Nigeria has sustained zero piracy incidents for four consecutive years. Speaking at a training graduation ceremony in Lagos, he credited the Deep Blue Project, a naval surveillance and rapid-response initiative, with the achievement.

“For four years now, Nigeria has maintained an impressive record of zero incidence of piracy attacks, leading to reduced war-risk insurance premiums and restoring Nigeria’s global maritime confidence,” he said.

The record often refers to attacks on commercial vessels. It says nothing about artisanal fishers and coastal traders — and that gap matters enormously.

Pluboard’s investigation last year, spanning communities across Akwa Ibom and Rivers State, found that attacks along Nigeria’s 850-kilometre coastline had not abated. They had simply shifted targets.

As naval patrols tightened around oil tankers and cargo ships, armed groups turned their guns on the country’s poorest workers at sea: small-scale fishers who borrowed to buy engines, and women traders who shuttle crayfish and dried fish between coastal towns and into Cameroon.

“There is hardly a week that someone has not been attacked,” Okon Ukutuda, a fishermen’s union leader in Ibaka, told Pluboard last year. “Even last week, they lost seven engines. Nothing has changed.”

Fishers described attackers arriving on speedboats with automatic rifles, stripping engines worth millions of naira, abducting people for ransom, and killing those who resisted. One woman recounted being held captive for three weeks on a remote island. A

review of news reports found 14 recorded incidents between 2021 and the time of reporting, involving 106 abductions and at least three deaths — with many more attacks going unreported entirely.

To fish at all, many had resorted to paying armed groups monthly protection fees of between ₦30,000 and ₦80,000 per boat.

NIMASA, for its part, had previously acknowledged in September 2024 that maritime insecurity, including “piracy and armed robbery”, persists. Yet the agency simultaneously claimed no recorded piracy incident in four years. When Pluboard asked about attacks on fishers and traders, it received no response.

The discrepancy reflects a definitional problem with consequences. International maritime piracy metrics track incidents involving vessels of a certain class, operating in open water.

Artisanal fishers in canoes and small motorboats, attacked close to shore, fall outside that frame. Their losses do not move the needle on insurance premiums or IMO membership categories — the metrics Mobereola cited this week.

But they shape life along the entire coastline. Artisanal fishing supports the livelihoods of roughly 24 million Nigerians and supplies more than 80 percent of the country’s domestic fish catch. When engines are stolen and fishers cannot afford replacements, boats sit idle. When traders are kidnapped, supply chains to inland markets break down.

“This place is very important economically but the government does not give attention,” Ukutuda told Pluboard. “Marine police and the Navy will say they are doing something, but they are doing nothing. We get no help.”