President General of the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN), Comrade Adewale Adeyanju, has disclosed the Union’s plans to go on inspection tour of seaport terminals, with the purpose of ascertaining the health of their toilet systems.
Comrade Adeyanju told OnepageAfrica in an interview in Lagos, at the weekend, that it had become necessary for the Union to embark on an inspection tour to be sure that terminals where their members are engaged for work have in place good sanitation facilities so that their health is not compromised.
He said: “Yes. Taking it back to environment, safety and health, some of the terminal operators that I can identify, if you go to their terminal, there is nothing like toilets, where the dockworkers equally spend their money to buy their coverall, their safety boot, their helmet and other things.
“This time around, we want to go round the ports for on-the-spot assessment, to those erring terminal operators who believe the health of the workers is not in their dictionary.
“So, we want to use your medium, this medium to tell them that very soon we would be going from one port to the other, up to Port Harcourt, Calabar. There are some terminals without toilets.
“I remember what happened in TICT, to the extent that we had to shut TICT. We shut it down for at least a day, before they now had a befitting toilet. I learnt they are going to commission it by next month.
“So, other terminals should emulate TICT. Some terminals do not have cloakrooms, they do not have where the workers can change their clothing after work hours; clean yourself as professionals, because they still believe that the dockworkers are still casual workers. They are no longer casual workers, but now professionals.
“The work have been standardized and professionalized; you cannot just pick somebody on the road and say yes come and work. It is no longer in the history of the dockworkers, because all of them have employment with their terminals and stevedoring companies. But their welfare is not in the heart of some these terminal operators.
“So, the Union is going to be out on that and we are going to seek the support of NIMASA to support us on this agenda, because they register them, they give them license.”
