75% of passenger boats plying Lagos waterways not seaworthy — NIWA

…To scrap unseaworthy boats

The National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) is set to scrap many unseaworthy boats following the agency’s investigation which revealed that 75 percent of passenger boats being used in Lagos are unseaworthy.

Speaking to maritime journalists on Wednesday, the Lagos Area Manager of NIWA, Engineer SaratBraimah revealed that NIWA has put in some conditions for boat operators to meet or forget about the ferry business.

According to Braimah, “What NIWA wants to do now is to sanitise those boat operators. We cannot wait until accidents happen again and from these two major accidents that happened this year, we have been able to analyse our investigations and we discovered that it was due to human errors.

“What I mean by human error is down to the maintenance of these boats. Most times, boat engines will go off mid-stream because of the speed the boat captains need, they won’t get it on the channel. So they will now move out of the channel to go to the shallow area so that they can maintain speed.

“As I speak to you, our Marine Unit is now in Ikorodu. I have embargoed boat movements in Ikorodu except for those certified. Yesterday, we certified 10 boats, and only those 10 boats will be the ones to operate for now.

“For other boats, we have instructed them to bring them down to our office here in Marina. We are not even going to Ikorodu to do the inspection.

“Most of the boats have a single hull and these single hull boats cannot withstand stress. Any single hit on the waterways and they will tumble. This is why some of them will hit a little pipe like this on the Waterways and will tumble. I have been inside a boat where we hit a wreck, the boat did not capsize because it had a double hull.

“Majorly, we have to scrap these boats. 75 percent of them are not seaworthy. The time they bought it, registered them, maintained them, even the maintenance has dropped and their life span too has dropped. So we want to know if there are 20 boats that are fit to operate from Ikorodu, Ibeshe jetty, let it be so. If it is 20 in Ebute, let it be so.

“The owners of the jetty are also part of the problem because they know that the fewer the number of boats, the less money they make. But we don’t care about how much a jetty makes. If it’s just 10 boats that are certified fit, let them pay for jetty use. I’m not targeting anybody, we are just after safety.

“So going forward, they have made some things mandatory for boat operators. Firstly, every boat must have a speedometer, it will allow passengers inside the boat to know whether the pilot is overspeeding or not.

“Secondly, every passenger boat must have life buoys on the boat. If there is an incident mid-stream, they will throw life buoys around for people to hold for safety. Four people can hold one. If you have three on a boat, that will save 12 people. Passengers have life jackets, but they usually take off immediately after they get inside the boat. At least, if that life buoy is there and they throw it out, they will hold on to it to stay afloat. So it is the best way to save people on water.

“And finally, every passenger boat will also have a Lifeguard who can swim in case of an accident. Lifeguards are divers, they can quickly jump into the water and save people. It will be the first response before the boats get there.

“NIWA is about to procure a technology called ‘Blue Me.’ Each driver on board will be given one. If they press it, it will give a signal about their location to everybody. It operates anywhere and it doesn’t have network issues and it will give us the location of the boats in times of emergencies. We have gotten the sample and we have tested it at Badagry. These are precautions we are putting in place for water transportation safety.”