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South Pacific Seafarer Crisis Exposes Abandonment Challenge

By Holly Pate In the tiny Pacific island nation of Fiji, nearly a thousand men, mostly from Tonga, have been stranded for months, with no way to get home. In Kiribati, a hundred men are in the same bind. Similar situations are occurring in Egypt and Canada. Tens of thousands of seafarers are entering the holiday season away from their families, having been desperately abandoned in countries scattered around the globe as COVID-19 has closed airports in their native countries, which tend to be smaller and lacking in the capacity to handle the logistics or health care personnel to handle mass repatriations of these crews.

Merchant Navy, others make case for Nigerian seafarers

The National President of Nigerian Merchant Navy Officers and Water Transport Senior Staff Association (NMNOWTSSA), Comrade Bob Yousou, has lamented abandonment, repatriation, insecurity, unpaid wages and poor remuneration as challenges facing the Nigerian seafarers. Yousou, who disclosed this at the commissioning of its newly acquired national secretariat in Apapa Lagos, said the hazardous nature of seafaring is worth appreciating, but the nation’s seafarers are maltreated and poorly remunerated by employers due to lack of Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) and sense of belonging to the right union. x “I want to urge the seafarers’ employers to always look at the plight of Nigerian seafarers by not owing them their wages, but pay as at when due. The hazardous nature of seafaring is worth appreciating. We shall no longer tolerate slavery wages for our seafarers. The International Labour Organisation standard in terms of decent working c

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