• Sanctions Unit Chairman In Charge Of The Terminal
Following the death of a dockworker; Mr Ahmed Usman at the Five Star Logistics Terminal last Saturday, the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) has slammed the management of the terminal, even as it rated the terminal poor in terms of safety precautions for dockworkers.
• Sanctions Unit Chairman In Charge Of The Terminal
Following the death of a dockworker; Mr Ahmed Usman at the Five Star Logistics Terminal last Saturday, the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) has slammed the management of the terminal, even as it rated the terminal poor in terms of safety precautions for dockworkers.
President of the dockworkers branch of MWUN, Comrade Adewale Adeyanju in an interview with Shipping Position Daily on Tuesday, condemned the management of the terminal for failing to provide adequate measures for the safety of lives of dockworkers at the terminal.
Reacting for the first time publicly on the tragic incident which led to the death of the dockworker, the branch president said: "It’s unfortunate that we lost a dockworker at Five Star Logistics while performing his official duties, accidents are inevitable but the safety procedure in Five Star Logistics is so porous, if there is adequate safety and live jackets, the man would have survived".
"We are now trying to make sure that all the terminal operators at Nigerian seaports provide life jackets on board vessels and any terminal that fails to do so we will protest and carry placards against such terminal, we cannot continue to lose our members on daily basis" he said.
Shipping Position Daily had exclusively reported on Tuesday that Ahmed Usman who was a specialist in forklift at the terminal, died while trying to avoid an accident at the terminal on Sunday night.
The deceased dockworker was working on a ship identified as MV Brilliant Ace which had arrived at the terminal on Thursday May 23 with both new and used vehicles.
One of his colleagues had told our correspondent that: "Usman tried to control the tractor while descending from the vessel at night but unknowingly for him, there was an SUV car parked at the outer part of the ramp which he tried to avoid"."In the process of that, the tractor reversed straight into the water pushing Umar down the quayside and into the lagoon”.
Throwing more light on the plight of dockworkers working at the various terminals at Tin Can port, the branch president; Adeyanju also disclosed that two dockworkers are currently recovering at the hospital as a result of the poor safety condition of the terminals at the Tin can Island port.
"If you go round the terminals, it is only few of them that are safety-conscious and believe in the safety of their workers, it is not everybody that knows how to swim, what they ought to do is provide life jackets, but they are not having it", he lamented.
"In terms of welfare we have a standard, we make sure that we collect adequate compensation from the terminal operator and the P&I club, their welfare is 100 percent okay, we even improved on it this year".
Even though Shipping Position Daily gathered that when it was finally pulled out, the corpse of the deceased dockworker had been badly mutilated by fishes, Adeyanju debunked the report, saying that the man had been buried on Sunday at Agege burial ground according to Muslim rights.
He explained that the union is already meeting with the management of the terminal and the P&I club in order to secure compensation for the family of the deceased.
Meanwhile, the union has sanctioned its chairman in charge of the Five Star Logistics Terminal for failing to make an accident report from the captain of the vessel and for even allowing it to sneak away unknowingly to the union.
The union confirmed that this is not the first time that the ship would be involved in similar things. According to it , the vessel; MV Brilliant Ace has always been synonymous with crane defects.
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