Sea Control - Sea Control 296 - Maritime Security in Mozambique with Dr. Assis Malaquias and Tim Walker

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Links1. Sea Control 218: Coastal Insecurity, Ansar Al-Sunna and Women in Maritime Security with Kelly Moss & Lexie Van Buskirk, by Walker Mills, CIMSEC, December 20, 2020.2. “Mozambique’s Tuna Corruption Scandal Puts Justice on Trial,” by Karen Schoonbee, BBC News, October 3, 2021.3.Institute for Security Studies website. 

Hey folks, Jared here. Walker Mills is your host today. He's joined by Tim Walker and Dr. Ashish Malakias to discuss the evolving maritime security situation in Mozambique. This episode was edited and produced by Alexia Boulaghi. At SimSec, we believe victory in the maritime domain starts with great ideas communicated compellingly. Write, fight, win. Beginning with Giving Tuesday and going through December, holding our annual Write, Fight, Win holiday donation campaign to support SimSec into the new year. SimSec's proud to say since our founding, our content has been free and always will be especially as more websites build paywalls or pursue intrusive advertising we hope those in the simsec community who value our free no ad model will consider supporting us

with monthly donations finally i want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the simsec podcast network the bilge pumps you can find alex jamie drack and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcast on that note i'll turn it over to kimbers man. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. Today, we're talking with Dr. Ashish Malakias, who is the professor and chair of Global Studies and Maritime Affairs Department at Cal Maritime, and Tim Walker, who is a senior researcher and the maritime project leader at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. Today, we're going to be talking about the evolving maritime security situation in Mozambique.

Some of our listeners may remember we did a great podcast with Kelly Moss and Lexi Van Buskirk of Stable Seas on the same topic a couple months ago. We'll make sure to put the link to that episode in the podcast notes. We're excited to have you guys on the podcast today and excited to be talking about African maritime security. Ashish, welcome aboard. Can you introduce yourself a bit more formally to our listeners. Sure, absolutely. And thank you so very much, Walker, for the opportunity.

My name is Asij Malakias. I'm a professor and chair of the Department of Global Studies and Maritime Affairs here at Cal Maritime. I've been here since 2017. Prior to that, I spent about 10 years with the Department of Defense, specifically working at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies,

Fort McNair in D.C. And I did, for most of that time, I led a number of USG engagements on the African continent, all around Africa. Mozambique, your topic today, but mostly the Gulf of Guinea. That's where I spent a tremendous amount of time doing maritime security work. Prior to that, I was just a pure academic. I spent 12 years at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. That's my background.

Tim, same question to you. Can you introduce yourself a bit more fully to our audience? Thanks, Walker. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for inviting me on the show today, and hello to all your listeners. I've been working at the Institute for Security Studies for 10 years. I started as an intern where my supervisor was a captain in the Navy who got me interested in all things piracy at the time, which was all the rage. We've broadened our focus beyond piracy to look at maritime security in terms of its development and its governance aspects. And we have a continental focus. The project we're currently implementing at the ISS is called Strengthening African Maritime Security Institutions, helping regions like Southern African Development Community, ECOWAS, and the African Union in terms of their strategy implementation and keeping track and engaging with all the relevant topics and issues of the day, which, to be honest, are often quite overlooked in Africa. I think we often suffer from what's termed sea blindness. I'm sure it's a concept very familiar to everybody listening.

And that kind of paradoxical ambivalence of maritime's importance in the overall scheme of things. And it's something I'm very excited, like I say, to be engaging with you today and looking forward to the conversation in terms of Mozambique. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us. And before we start, I'd like to remind our listeners that our opinions presented here are solely our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that we're associated with. Some of our listeners are familiar with the maritime situation in East Africa, but some are not. So do you think you can give us kind of an overview of what's going on regarding maritime security developments generally in the region before we narrow down on Mozambique? Sure. Of course, the East African region was catapulted to the top of the security agenda back in the early 2000s, when piracy around the Horn of Africa was a major issue. You know, of course, we know the background to that situation. And it boils down to the collapse of the state in Somalia. The state collapsed, and it was unable to exert sovereign control, both on land and at sea. You know, there were, of course, different explanations as to why the piracy of the Horn of Africa really escalated and expanded.

You know, you had pirate attacks going all the way and pretty close to India and all the way down into the Mozambique channel. It was a major concern for the countries in the region and also internationally, of course, because of the importance of that body of water for international trade, a tremendous amount of movement of ships up and down that region. So that prompted the international community to intervene, to act forcefully. A lot of countries, the United States, European nations, Asian nations, sent equipment into the region to ensure that security was reestablished in the region. And by and large, that succeeded. By and large, that succeeded. You saw really a drastic reduction, piracy attacks of the foreign of Africa. Now, I've always said that the pirates were on holidays, were on forced holidays, because of the presence of such a huge armada, international naval presence in the region. I always say, and it's only half-jokingly, that the Pirates are on holidays because they're rational players, just like you and I. They're very rational players. There's no way that they could have continued to carry out their activities with the international name of presence there.

What has not changed is the situation on the ground. Because what happens at sea is a reflection of what happens on land. The situation in Somalia has not fundamentally changed in a sense that you do not have a functioning state in Somalia. You do not. You have a situation where, you know, the state is still pretty much a mirage in Somalia. So you do not really have the capacity to exert a sovereign authority at sea. So that's Somalia. The situation in the region has become a bit unstable in recent years because, of course, of the situation in Mozambique that we are talking about now.

You have forces in the area that are using, in a way, a bit of the lawlessness at sea to infiltrate on land and create instability. This is the situation you have in the area right now. Somalia is still not stable. And because of that, you have the roots of maritime instability, the maritime insecurity in Africa. Those roots are still there. Those roots are still there. What the international community has been able to do is take care of the surface, what happens on the surface. But deep, those deep roots are still there. So you will continue to have instability resurface.

And because the regional players do not have the capacity to provide the wherewithal for maritime security, the only player in the region that has some capacity is South Africa. And we can talk about South Africa. And of course, Tim knows a lot more about, you know, the South African capacity than I do. But South Africa is being very reluctant to deploy its assets up and down the east coast of Africa, even when the international community. And in fact, at that time, I was working for the Department of Defense. Even when the international community was asking South Africa to deploy assets, South Africa was very reluctant. South Africa was basically saying, well, you do that because you have better assets than I do. You know, I'm just going to go maybe into the Mozambique channel and then retreat back. So the situation in the region is such that the states are still not able to control their maritime domains, and that leaves sufficient space for non-state actors to operate in criminal activities, insurgencies, and so on and so forth. So, Walker, in a nutshell, very, very briefly, this is how I see the situation in the region.

The only state that kind of is able to protect, to project its power at sea in the region has been Kenya. Other than that, you have a situation where states and their naval forces are really, really not playing the kind of role that one would expect them to play. Next, Tim, can you explain a little more specifically what the situation is in Mozambique and the Mozambique channel and then really kind of drill down and what's going on in Cabo Delgado? Most people will have heard of the situation as it stands in Mozambique as the result of the success of an Islamist insurgency, capturing a number of strategic towns within northern Mozambique at the province of Capo d'Argado and also threatening southern Tanzania as well the roots of this insurgency which goes by the name Al-Shabaab locally which is no connection to Al-Shabaab in Somalia it means the youth which is also called Al-Sunnah and I'm sure many who have listened to the previous

podcast you mentioned which kelly moss and lexi van buzzkirk have done um referred to in mozambique you've had an enormous kind of microcosm enormous microcosm sounds odd i know but it's a microcosm of or a fulcrum of so many trends uh trajectories issues in maritime energy global religious political economy factors which have all come into play almost at the same time triggered in a way by the discovery of some absolutely huge reserves of natural gas offshore some of the largest in the world has often been talk of Mozambique becoming like the new Qatar which I think a lot of people were very taken with the idea because of the enormous wealth that seemed to promise but this was not in the context in which this could be

talked of as equitably shared you have had a huge amount or an increasing number of grievances from local communities over the last well really since the end of the end of the civil war in the 1990s where resources such as the discovery of rubies gold the export of things like timber those have been conducted in a very corrupt very clandestine way in which any kind of benefits which could be done from doing those activities mining etc legitimately have not been shared they've actually been uh subject people have been subject quite often to displacement to repression and i say that's that's a kind of a bit of a tinderbox in a way and there has been over the last couple of decades as well a number of islamist groups who have taken root in the

region southern tanzania and mozambique and attracted a number of followers and it seems the group which are currently proving very successful have managed to combine their message of the local grievances which are part of the context of mozambique with a mission as it were a uh hitching it to their uh to their wagon to um try and claim some kind of stateless presence and the absence of the Mozambique state in which to practice whatever form of society they want but this has like say taken on a very very brutal aspect uh almost a million people have been displaced from villages and towns throughout the province of Cappadocia many thousands have been killed. It's very hard to get a precise number, but many of them have been killed in

incredibly brutal ways. And that is often what I think a lot of people have noted or have come across in this regard. But it's very important, as I say, just to stress some of the key underlying or anchoring reasons why Mozambique is in the news. There's gas, there's an insurgency, there's a huge amount of money being pumped into the province or being extracted from the province i'd say in many many ways in many often in many illegal or illicit ways as well so you have honestly uh like i say i got a kind of coalescing of piracy in many respects we've um ashish was mentioning just now about um south africa and the patrols there's often been concerns in the past about piracy spreading south from somalia but increasingly i would say there is a

a growing concern that there could be piracy taking root in the region i think that's something we're very keen to discuss in a minute but uh the the threat of terrorism the fact that there are huge amounts of transnational crime smuggling of natural resources there is human trafficking there is arms trafficking and there's drugs trafficking it's a major stop-off point or conduit point entry point if you were as you were into the african continent from heroin sources in south asia um coming from iran from from afghanistan and pakistan dhows which have come south and land often in the region to offload drugs as well so as i say you have so many issues gas of which many energy companies are heavily invested uh regional interests in not

having a insurgency take root which could destabilize the region and uh and transnational crime which has really kind of spread its tentacles into into the province as it were all coming together and uh yeah i'll leave it at that for now thanks i see sorry i want to turn back to you and ask about the the international community's involvement in mozambique and how have they uh been involved obviously tim was talking about um commercial investment but then also, you know, are they supporting in kind of a security sense? And then what is the kind of risk that this is going to spill over into more of a regional issue than purely one in Mozambique? It's a very important question. The international community, in many ways, was caught by surprise

by shouldn't, you know, and we'll get to that in a minute. The international community should not have been caught by surprise because the signs have been there for decades. But to your point, what is the international community doing right now? Two key players, the United States and Portugal. The United States has offered support, specific security support, basically training. anti-insurgency training. That's what the United States is doing right now. Portugal has also offered support, military training. Portugal has sent troops, trainers, more specifically to Mozambique

to help the security forces handle the situation. If you were to ask me, I don't think that the international community really can do very much to turn the situation around, because it's a very complex, it's a very difficult situation that has been brewing for years, if not decades. it will not have a simple military solution. So if we as the United States or Portugal believe that this will have the situation lends itself to an easy solution, we are fooling ourselves. Why do I say that? The situation has been developing over the years because what you really see is a combination of factors coming together. You see, on one hand, poor governance. We can talk about this in great detail. On the other hand, you have what has been called the resource curse. When you have poor governance and the resource curse in a growing population,

especially youth population you know you have conditions for instability and this is what's happening in Mozambique what the international community can do what the international community should do is to help Mozambique get its house in order by that I mean good governance transparent accountable governance, making sure that the citizens are taken care of. The citizens are at the very center of all concerns, whether we're talking about national concerns in Mozambique, whether we're talking about more localized concerns in Cabo Delgado, the citizens have to be at the very center of all attentions. So that's something that the international community can do basically to reduce that governance or eliminate, you know, ideally eliminate the governance deficit

because the governance deficit in Mozambique today is very, very, very high. And this, what you're seeing in northern Mozambique is a direct result, is a direct consequence of that governance deficit. Reducing the governance deficit also involves getting rid of corruption again the corruption has been one of the key triggers of the uh the insurgency in northern mozambique the fralimo regime has been incredibly corrupt just hugely corrupt so basically by by corruption it means all the public resources all the public funds all the public monies that should have been allocated, that should have been deployed to improve the livelihoods of people, they are being redirected into the pockets of officials, of ruling party

officials. Of course, the people are aware of that. And people, in their attempts to redress the situation, they're picking up arms. So the international community has to be aware of the fundamental issues, of the fundamental issues, address those fundamental issues, and then the security situation will fall into place. What the international community seems to be doing is the reverse. Try to address the security situation and hope that the governance issues will fall into place. I think that that equation has to be right, and I think we're getting it wrong right now. I think that's a really important point that you're making, that maritime insecurity is a symptom of less than good governance, and the solution is good governance. I think we have

sometimes a tendency to think, you know, and I do want to talk, you know, platforms, do they need boats, do they need radars, and they need arms or training, but it's really at its core, the solution is this kind of good governance, you know, kind of want to want to follow up and ask, because it's a governance related issue, what's what's the danger of, of spread? Does that mean that Mozambique's neighbors are better prepared against it, because they have, you know, different governance situations or are they going to be susceptible to the same type of same type of threats well you know it's not just uh muslim beaks neighbors is the whole continent you know is we're not just talking about tanzania uh we're not just talking about kenya and and somalia and across uh the

channel to uh to madagascar you know it's a whole region the whole southern african region the whole entire continent has a huge governance deficit so basically all of them are susceptible to being ignited by what from an outside perspective might be seen as a small spark you know the whole entire continent the continent is basically a tinderbox you know uh you'll be hard-pressed to name a handful of states, a handful of nation states in Africa that do not have a governance deficit. You know, very, very few. So to your question, the conditions are ripe in the region and throughout the continent. The conditions are ripe with the type of, of, you know, a situation we see in northern Mozambique right now.

You have, again, resources, abundant resources being exploited for the benefit of the ruling elites and outsiders. Yeah, the outside companies that are coming in to explore the resources, they're doing well. The ruling elites, they're doing very, very well. What about the people? What about the population on the ground? They're not. You go to Cabo Delgado and you're going to see poverty. Poverty, the likes of which, you know, it's very difficult to find even on the African continent. People are poor, but people know that their resources are being extracted and they're benefiting some, not them.

You see a situation where because of the abundance of resources benefiting the few, you have deep resentments, very, very deep resentments among the population. And this is not a new story. There's nothing new about this story. You know, sometimes we forget that the National Liberation War in Mozambique, where did they start? They started in Cabo Delgado. This is the first shot against the Portuguese in a 10-year liberation war that started in 1964, last all the way to 1974. Where did he start? He started in Cabo Delgado. So, Tim, I want to give you a chance to kind of follow up on that, about the deeper context and the roots and the kind of deeper governance issues. One of the things Ashish was mentioning just now is really relevant to the maritime security side of things in terms of the capacity for corruption that we've observed, not just within Capital Gardo, but within Mozambique and Frelimo itself. And that concerns the hidden debt scandal. Many listeners will remember a few years ago, I believe it was 2016, Mozambique had offered a series of bonds for tuna fishing. had taken out about 180 50 million kind of guaranteed bond to purchase these vessels from a dubai-based company called priv invest which is run by iskander safa who was one of the richest

men in france these bonds and the vessels which they were going to be used to you know fund in terms of the profits were being restructured and upon closer inspection the government admitted that it had actually taken out two secret loans guaranteed by the state to purchase maritime security vessels and equipment to drive a profit from if it's protecting liquid natural gas facilities if it's extracting almost like a toll from vessels transiting through the mozambique channel now the imf did not take this very well neither did many of the investors around the world least of course to say and the total amount of prox is approximately 2.2 billion dollars so that's 2.2 billion dollars which the Mozambique state has said it will guarantee repayment on to

investors who had bought into the bonds and loans which have been sold by banks like Credit Suisse and and VTB in Russia among others it's a it's a source of perpetual frustration for me and for many others in in south africa and southern africa that in the name of maritime security or using maritime security as an excuse or as a pretext or as a selling point that huge amounts of money were funneled from these banks to uh priv invest they didn't really even this money didn't really even enter mozambique it seems and this is coming from the records of a recent court case in i believe the eastern district of um of new york about two years ago of one of the key priv invest officials um he was acquitted of the crimes but it's on public record a lot of this

corruption uh which was facilitated through this process in the name of maritime security huge amounts of equipment was bought uh which is not being used um if you were to go on google earth right now or go google um google pro earth any of the kind of technology satellite providers of information and pictures and go to pemba or go to maputo and go to the port infrastructure you will see vessels almost stacked on each other um these are the vessels which were purchased with these loans in the name of producing maritime security which have never been utilized or those which have been utilized have been poorly maintained never been repaired and when they have been utilized such as the attack on palma when it was noted that uh one of what's called

an ocean eagle vessel a trimaran which was purchased under these uh with the actually with the tuna bond i'll get into that in a minute they're just sitting there there's nobody to run them i think i think kelly moss mentioned in in the podcast from last year on this um quite rightly the mozambique navy is approximately 200 people and that doesn't mean 200 sailors that means 200 people admirals down to able seamen across to hr departments etc there's nobody to run these vessels and this was never really seriously considered as part of this deal it seems that these loans were taken out to yeah to create um corruption to facilitate corruption this like i say this is on record on the in the court transcripts of this case um it's basically

admitted that you need to pay bribes in mozambique to get anything done that's what the company said and it said it in a kind of so what that that's just how you do things so we're we're dealing here with a situation where so much has already happened which is going to take years to redress in terms of justice is going as my Mozambique people in a almost a completely horrendous situation where they're expected to be the people who are going to repay a lot of these debts without ever having actually obviously had a say in the first place but uh but but having the very kind of money which would they would hope to benefit from in terms of jobs from the investment in capital gado not actually even happening anymore as well because of the insurgency

you have this absolutely let's say horrendous maelstrom of of uh of corruption and crime and insecurity coming together now now it's taking on a very maritime dimension because as we've mentioned just as we mentioned earlier thousands of people when they flee palma when they flee towns like mozambique prior which was one of the main towns captured last year they take to the seas it is the easiest the quickest way out of there and to find refuge on some of the many islands in mozambique or further in to the south or indeed into tanzania as well people have fled north via boats into tanzania these kind of vessels which were bought under these hidden debts would have been ideal to escort these um flotillas of refugees to safely escort them

to wherever they need to go but also maybe to even had a an impact in terms of some kind of amphibious operation or amphibious presence uh naval presence in the bays which would have deterred the insurgents from approaching or even considering that the coastlines were areas in which they could operate freely there's been a complete lack of control um i would say there's um there was a naval theorist called um colin gray or strategist i should say who talked of the sufficiency of control there's been uh no sufficiency of control for a long time and the irony of the very sad paradox is that the very equipment which would have been ideal for this maybe not well suited but something's better than nothing in many of these situations

is sitting just a few hundred kilometers south of these areas and i do not know what these refugees think when they enter palm excuse me when they enter pemba and see many many millions worth the value of these vessels was hugely inflated i should actually just mention that the the reason there is talk of corruption and kickbacks and bribery is that independent experts who looked at the value of the vessels bought under with these hidden debts said they'd been overpaid you know five six times over um they're not worth 80 million they're worth 10 million or they're worth 15 million so when people see billions basically of equipment billions of dollars of naval equipment sitting in Mozambique having probably fled south

in horrendous circumstances as well with the terror of potentially insurgents taking into taking to taking to the seas in boats which are many of which they've captured and attacking them again and we've had reports of that as well and this stems not from necessarily a lack of maritime awareness or a fact that maritime policy is not a high enough priority within the policies of Mozambique and and neighboring countries it stems from corruption and that is like I say a very sad story to to have to tell and something which is not easily resolvable I would the final thing I'll just mention in terms of this is people if they're interested in this there is that U.S. court case from 2019 there is a current court case underway in London and the high court in London at the

moment in which uh there is the Mozambican president has been named in a suit now as well there is a the former minister of finance of Mozambique who kind of signed off on these hidden debts sitting in a South African jail at the moment as there's a tug of war going on between Mozambique and the United States over extraditing him and South Africa is in this very awkward position where it has obviously a regional neighborliness and feeling of solidarity with its neighbor stemming from you know decades of collaboration which it feels like well if justice can be done in Mozambique there's no sense in extraditing him to the United States but there's also that fear that there will be no justice really if his name is Manuel Chang is extradited

to Mozambique and I think a lot of people are hoping and and waiting to see if South Africa makes the call to extradite into the United States because the information in terms of corruption kickbacks bribery the very kind of networks which facilitated these billions and billions of dollars worth of of useless naval equipment sitting rusting away in in Pemba he probably has those answers and that's why like i say it's worth keeping an eye on that because it's going to be a fascinating case once it fingers crossed comes to trial thanks tim and asish i was hoping you could kind of zoom us out a little bit um and you know with your with your depth of knowledge in africa and talk about where else on the continent we should be looking for potential

maritime you know security flash points um you know i mean obviously we've been talking about the Mozambican channel. You talked in the beginning about Somalia. We just did a podcast on illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing in Gambia with Ian Urbina. I read something recently that there's a U.S. admiral arguing that China might be interested in developing a naval base in Africa as well. Where should we be paying attention in terms of maritime security, unless the answer is just all over well uh the answer is all over but that's the easy answer uh i think we need to be uh a lot more specific than that uh so we've been talking about east africa from somalia all the way down to uh into the mozambique channel that will and in fact across

to Madagascar, that will continue to be, you know, an area of concern. And I say that because for me, you have three terrible ingredients converging. You have resources. I say resources is a terrible ingredient because it's being used in terrible ways. resources are there and resources that generate fuel corruption you also have the governance deficit that i've talked about earlier and then you have population growth massive population growth especially youth unemployment so when you have those three ingredients expect problems expect problems

so we talked about the east coast of Africa we can go around the Cape you got issues there you got issues in South Africa and Tim can talk about those issues much much better than I can

you know you have issues in South Africa and then you go up the coast on the west coast of Africa from angola all the way to senegal which is an area that i know well you know i spent quite a few years uh leading uh u.s government engagements in that particular area you have massive problems there massive problems the epicenter on that part of africa is nigeria expect continuing problems

in nigeria center in nigeria and radiating out to cameroon the whole region gabon toriel guinea down to the two congos angola and up all the way to all the way to senegal expect problems there So the issue or the problem is not confined to East Africa. I can go around and around the continent and point to you just about every single coastal state has issues. Every single coastal state on the continent of Africa has issues. What is the solution? I think you have to look at it from a micro level all the way to the macro level. You know, the citizen keeps going back to the citizen.

You have to pay attention to the citizen. The citizen has to be the center of all the efforts. And African states made the mistake of focusing on the security of the regime, the security of the states, and ignoring the security of the citizen, whether you're talking about human security, physical security, and so on. And that's a massive strategic mistake. And this is the reason why African states keep finding themselves into all sorts of security predicaments. Because they're thinking that they're strengthening the states, but they're not. because the citizen is being weakened. The citizen is being disempowered. So we have to get those equations right in Africa. Those are the strategic security equations.

At the operational level, you can chase the pirates away. You could chase the rebels away. You could do that. But those operational successes, they tend to be temporary. They tend to be temporary. The pirates come back. The insurgents come back because the conditions are still very fertile for piracy and insurgency. So you need to deal with the fundamental strategic issues.

You know, what the commanders are doing with their ships at sea, that's very important. That's very important. But what the politicians are doing on shore, it's even more important. It's even more important. So don't tell the admirals and the Navy captains and so on, resolve the maritime problems. Well, they will never be able to resolve the maritime problems if the land-based problems are not resolved. If you try to solve the maritime problems without solving the land-based problems, you're wasting your time. Well, Asish, I think that's a fantastic point to end on. And unfortunately, we're pretty much out of time. We didn't get the opportunity that we might have had to kind of dive a little bit more with Tim into kind of South Africa in their role.

Um, but hopefully that we can, we'll be able to invite, uh, both of you back to the podcast in the future. Um, cause I think, you know, Africa, like, you know, like we've been saying is a little bit overlooked sometimes in terms of maritime security. Um, but obviously we, we should be paying attention to it before we go. I just want to give both of you an opportunity to tell us, um, you know, if you're active online where our listeners can find you. Um, and if you're working on any current projects or publications that we might see coming out

soon. I see I'll let you go first sure absolutely just look me up if you look at my name Cal Maritime I don't think there are too many Dr. Malakias at Cal Maritime so yeah that's that's the best way for you to find me and I love the place I love interacting with my cadets a lot easier interacting with cadets than with admirals and captains by the way so I'm really loving it over to you tim thanks um yeah the iss website uh if you there's many many isss and actually funnily enough it's very difficult to say iss people sometimes say isis and it sounds incredibly wrong so the institute for security studies is the best way to find us by googling

all our maritime publications are there freely download them um this is the first time i've been asked to go on a podcast i'm really appreciate the opportunity walker thank you so much for asking me to speak like i said there's many many issues we could continue to discuss um like i'm very happy to discover operation copper at the moment we actually have a report coming out uh probably in the next couple of months on that because it's gone through 10 years of deployment and it's time for a audit or a baseline assessment some of the other topics we've been looking at are some of the longer-term issues potentially facing African countries, especially around the increasing importance of boundary disputes and finding a peaceful resolution to that, especially with

more and more offshore resources being discovered or being valued even greater than before, and the effects of population increase and climate change on many coastal communities and coastal cities. Africa is one of the few places in the world where population is increasing and there's a forecast to increase most of this will occur in coastal areas which are being subject to climate change and increasing problems of illegal fishing so therefore we have a massive question which needs to be asked and answered of how will we feed ourselves in 20-30 years time if illegal fishing carries on at the same rate but we all have double the population living in increasingly inhospitable conditions so that's what we'll be focusing on for the next couple of weeks

and months and look forward to engaging with anybody who wants to get in touch on Twitter, on LinkedIn, we're very easy to find. And hopefully we'll talk about this soon again, because like I say, there's, there's a couple of interesting stories to tell about Operation Copper, which I look forward to sharing. Fantastic. Well, we look forward to having you both back. And we'll make sure to put links below the podcast to those websites. So it's a little bit easier for everyone to find you. Finally, I'd like to thank my guests again, Tim Walker and Dr. Ashish Malikyash for joining us today and talking about maritime security in Africa. Thanks again and take care.

Thank you. We'll be right back.