The President General of the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) Comrade Adewale Adeyanju has said the union is in full support of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) theme for the year on empowering women in the maritime community, which will serve as an opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of gender equality, in line with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
Adeyanju stated this while receiving the recently-crowned queen of the Face of Maritime International (FOMI) Miss Uzoigwe Melissa, who represented the Union and came out to be the overall winner of the contest.
Speaking at the welcome party organized for the queen, the President General noted that at first he didn’t pay much of attention to why the union should support a beauty pageant programme, but after given it much thought, he realized that there is need for the union to participate as a way of encouraging and empowering women in line with the world maritime day theme on empowering women.
“I know many of you will be surprised and asked; why are we into beauty pageant, I myself was contemplating on supporting the programme, but on the other hand other, big industry player like NPA, NIMASA, and so on are all participating in the pageant, and this is one of the ways we can also align ourselves with the IMO theme on empowering women, so we keyed in, and to our surprise the pageant who represented us was crowned the FOMI queen.
“I learnt this is the fourth edition, we never participated in any of the previous ones, so for the very first time, our representative was crowned the queen of FOMI, we are very happy for this giant stride” he said.
Speaking at the welcome ceremony, the convener and Director of Face Of Maritime International, Mr Obasi Sylvanus said that FOMI aims to change the perception that maritime is all for men.
He added that the FOMI queens would champion the Girls Go-To-Sea Campaign (GGOTSEC), organise mentoring sessions for maritime students and promote Nigeria’s maritime tourism potential as their pet-project during their one-year reign.
An indigene of Enugu state and a graduate of accounting from Ogun State Institute of Technology (OGITECH) has won the Season 4 edition of Face Of Maritime International (FOMI) held in Lagos.
The queen; Uzoigwe Melissa, a garnered a total of 21,786 votes to beat the rest of the contestants.
Meanwhile, Emri Justina, a 22 year old indigene of Cross River state, who represented the Nigeria Customs Service emerged the 1st Runner up with a total of 5,700 votes, while Obodozie Adeze, a 20 year old indigene of Imo state who represented the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) emerged the 2nd Runner up with a total of 4700 votes.
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