title: Crude oil theft, petrol-piracy and illegal trade in fuel
title: an enterprise-value chain perspective of energy-maritime crime in the Gulf
      of Guinea
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Balogun, Wasiu Abiodun
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2018

description: The Gulf of Guinea (GoG) has developed into a global energy-maritime crime
      hotspot, with Nigeria being the epicentre of illegal oil-related maritime
      activities in the region. For several decades, scholars have sought to
      justify crude oil theft, petro-piracy and illegal fuel trade especially in
      the waters of Nigeria, in the context of greed-grievance. While that
      approach provides a basis for understanding the realities of illegal
      energy-maritime activities in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, it does
      little to explain how the illicit activities have evolved into a global
      enterprise it is today, the dynamics of the business and the
      infrastructure that sustain the criminality. Against the backdrop of this
      limitation in existing theoretical underpinning of illegal energy-maritime
      activities in the GoG, this study adopts an enterprise-value chain model
      which, moving beyond the greed-grievance narrative, emphasises the primacy
      of both the enterprise and the marketplace (not players in the market) in
      explaining, and understanding the dynamics, complexities and persistence
      of crude oil theft, petro-piracy and illegal fuel trade in the GoG. The
      enterprise-value chain approach as adopted in the study, offers an
      advantage of interdisciplinary perspective, combining Smith’s enterprise
      theory of crime and Porter’s business management concept of value chain to
      understanding energy-maritime criminality in the GoG. 
      
      The enterprise-value chain model sees the tripod of crude oil theft,
      petro-piracy and illegal trade in fuel as an organised crime; a
      well-structured economic activity whose business philosophy hinges on the
      provision of illegal goods and services. Such activities exist because the
      legitimate marketplace has limited capacity to meet the needs of potential
      customers. 
      
      Within the enterprise-value chain framework, the study identifies, and
      analyses the dynamics of overlap, cooperation and conflict among the
      different players in the illegal energy-maritime industry as well as
      mutually beneficial relationships between formal and informal
      energy-maritime economies. Such an overlap is critical to understanding
      both the nature of the business and its sustaining value chain. 
      
      The study concludes that current energy-maritime security architecture in
      the Gulf of Guinea does not capture the organised, enterprise nature of
      illicit offshore and onshore activities and its sustaining value chain,
      which highlights its inherent limitation viz-a-viz the region’s quest for
      energy-maritime security. There is therefore an urgent need to address
      this seeming gap as it determines significantly how the phenomenon is
      considered both for academic purposes and public policy. It is this
      obvious gap in both academic literature and policy on maritime security in
      the GoG that this study intends to fill. The study, in the context of its
      theoretical framework, develops a business approach to enhancing
      energy-maritime security in the GoG.