1. The importance of the seas and oceans to human existence is recognized all over the world. In Africa, the seas and oceans serve as source of life, ecosystem support, food produce, energy source as well as sources of employment. This underscores the importance that African coastal states attach to their respective maritime domains. In recent times, however, the African maritime space has witnessed increasing and diverse security threats such as climate change, pollution, IUU fishing, piracy and other forms of armed attacks on shipping, illegal oil bunkering activities and maritime terrorism amongst others. Considering the cross border nature of the seas/oceans and the fluid nature of maritime crimes, there is the need for corporative security mechanisms among states in Africa.
2. The various sub regional bodies such as ECOWAS, ECCAS and SADC have come up with maritime security strategies and developed frameworks/protocols to achieve the objectives of their strategies. However, gaps still exist due to lack of coordination between the respective regional economic communities as well as the AU. This brings to the fore, the need for a corporative regional maritime security architecture in line with the operations of the AIMS 2050. Arising from the foregoing, the paper shall further examine the following: