Pirates are glorified criminals.

The life of a pirate is packed with danger. But the myth about pirates only celebrates the loots.

There is nothing romantic about being a pirate. The sea may be their playground but it is also the burial ground of many of them. The pirates get the girls. But the girls end up not enjoying life with the pirates.

Nothing about pirates has changed since the beginning of time.

Pirates crawl out when the state fails. It is the same with the Vikings who raided the rivers of medieval Western Europe and North Africa; the Arabs who ransacked Rome in the 9th century or the Irish who captured and enslaved St. Patrick. Whenever there is a coastline failed state, there is a sea full of pirates.

Pirates are daring criminals who have nothing else to lose but to stake their lives on the sea front. In the failed state where they come from, there are lords. Their return to land is often celebrated.

To stop the menace of pirates, powerful states in the past had gone to the sea to engage and squashed the network of pirates. Because the sea is wide and large, pirates continue to reemerge at other parts of the sea. From the ancient time to the present, it has been a running battle between the rouge pirates and the legitimate states.

Sad as it may sound, pirates are another reminder that we are all connected, just as the foott is connected to the head. We cannot be human alone and expect tranquility to reign across the globe.

Since 1991, the Somali state had been a no-man’s land. The world essentially turned its back on Somalia because it had constituted itself into a headache. For more than 18 years, the wound that was Somali became pus and in the pus now emerged worms called pirates. It is impacting the rest of the world’s business along the Gulf of Eden to the tune of $16 billon a year.

Time and time again, legitimate nations have spent substantial amount of their fortune battling pirates at sea. Sometimes, nations failed due to that diversion of resources and attention.

The best way to catch a pirate is to eliminate the conditions that create it.