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Assessing Maritime Security, Information And Communications Technology
[A CASE STUDY OF RIVERS PORT]
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background of the study
Worldwide Port and Maritime operations and their associated facilities and infrastructure collectively represent one of the single greatest unaddressed challenges to the security of nations and the global economy today. The reason that ports and shipping activity are so difficult to secure lies primarily in their technology. Ports are typically large, asymmetrical activities dispersed over hundreds of acres of land and water so that they can simultaneously accommodate ship, truck and rail traffic, petroleum product/liquid offload, storage or piping, and container storage.
The movement of freight, cargo (solid or liquid), and transport through a port is generally on a “queuing†system, meaning that any delay snarls all operations. Whether or not delays are related to security, security generally falls by the wayside in the interest of time management or convenience. Globally, there are very few uniform standards for point-to-point control of security on containers, cargoes, vessels or crews – a port’s security in one nation remains very much at the mercy of a port’s security, or lack thereof, in another nation. Organized crime is entrenched in many ports and a large majority of them still do not require background checks on dock workers, crane operators or warehouse employees. Most ports lease large portions of their facility to private terminal operating companies, who are responsible for their own security. The result of this is a “balkanizedâ€, uneven system of port security and operations management as a whole.
1.2 Statement of the problem
Maritime security is, indeed, a quandary (Uadiale and Yonmo, 2010a). The disintegration of central government authority, the lack of maritime security has, therefore, become a grave problem. The Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea are thus symbols of “the few cases in Africa where security onland have spilled over and affected maritime security severelyâ€. The lack of maritime security in the region and the fact that it was not possible to enforce the law and maintain good order at sea, threatened maritime communication, maritime sovereignty and stimulated piracy. While much of the insecurity mid-wifed, piracy of the Somalia coast stems from the collapse of governance, and law and order in Somalia, in the Gulf of Guinea, the situation is somewhat different. Maritime piracy in the Gulf of Guinea is more directly politically driven. In Nigeria, politics onland directly result in offshore actions, causing the hub of insecurity onland in the Niger Delta region to spill into the Gulf of Guinea to promote bad order at sea. According to the maritime watchdog – the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), the waters of Nigeria are now the second most dangerous in the world, next to Somalia.The proliferation of piracy in the West African region has been of concern amongst government and the oil industry since 1999. With militant groups turning pirates in the Niger Delta, claiming that they are sabotaging the oil industry for political purposes in protest of the mismanagement of Nigeria’s oil wealth. However, these political grievances are increasingly taking on a criminal nature (Uadiale and Yonmo, 2010a).
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