Maritime Security and Safety
IMO Chief Demands Coordinated Global Response as Hormuz Crisis Leaves 20,000 Seafarers Stranded
IMO Chief Demands Coordinated Global Response as Hormuz Crisis Leaves 20,000 Seafarers Stranded
By Okeoghene Onoriobe | Waterways News Correspondent | Lagos
LAGOS — The Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Arsenio Dominguez, has sounded the alarm over the deepening humanitarian and shipping crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, warning that piecemeal national responses are failing stranded seafarers and threatening the integrity of global trade routes.
Dominguez issued the call during a virtual high-level meeting convened by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, bringing together foreign ministers from more than 40 countries to assess conditions in one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints.
At the heart of the appeal is the fate of an estimated 20,000 seafarers who remain stranded aboard vessels in the Persian Gulf following a sharp escalation in hostilities that began on February 28, 2026. Since then, the IMO has recorded at least 21 attacks on commercial shipping in the region, leaving 10 seafarers dead and several others with serious injuries. Those still aboard vessels are enduring dwindling provisions, extreme fatigue, and mounting psychological strain.
Diplomacy Over Fragmentation
Dominguez was unequivocal in his assessment of what the crisis demands. “Fragmented responses are no longer sufficient to resolve this crisis. What is urgently required is diplomatic engagement, practical and neutral solutions, and coordinated international action,” he told ministers.
The IMO chief urged all parties to uphold freedom of navigation, protect the rights and welfare of seafarers, and support the establishment of humanitarian corridors to facilitate urgent aid delivery to affected vessels.
IMO’s Operational Response
Following an extraordinary IMO Council session held on March 18 and 19, the organisation has moved to operationalise a maritime evacuation framework built around cooperation with coastal states, verified security assurances, and industry-wide coordination.
Key measures already underway include efforts to guarantee safe passage for stranded crews, strengthen data collection and verification processes, and maintain supply lines to affected vessels. The IMO has also launched a dedicated online platform to provide verified, real-time information for seafarers and maritime stakeholders navigating the crisis.
The organisation is working in close partnership with major industry bodies — including BIMCO, ICS, ITF, INTERTANKO, and WSC — to enhance information sharing and mount a coherent sector-wide response.
UN Task Force Activated
The IMO is also participating in a newly established United Nations task force led by Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS). The task force draws in representatives from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), with a mandate to address the full range of humanitarian challenges unfolding in the region.
Dominguez reiterated that seafarers are neutral actors performing lawful duties and must not become pawns in geopolitical disputes. Describing the situation as “unacceptable and unsustainable,” he called on all stakeholders to take immediate, concrete steps to safeguard seafarers in line with their obligations under international law.
Nigeria Watch
How the Hormuz Crisis Touches Nigerian Maritime Interests
The escalating crisis in the Strait of Hormuz carries direct and compounding implications for Nigeria’s maritime sector, energy economy, and seafaring workforce.
Crude exports and tanker exposure. Nigeria remains a significant crude oil exporter, and a substantial share of Nigerian crude — particularly grades bound for Asian markets — transits routes that feed through or are priced against Persian Gulf benchmarks. Sustained disruption in the Hormuz corridor tightens global tanker supply, pushes spot fixture rates higher, and compresses margins for Nigerian charterers and terminal operators reliant on cost-competitive freight. The Dangote Refinery, now exporting refined products, is similarly exposed to tanker availability pressures in a disrupted market.
Nigerian seafarers at risk. Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest suppliers of maritime labour, with thousands of Nigerian officers and ratings serving aboard vessels globally. The possibility that Nigerian nationals are among the 20,000 seafarers stranded in the Persian Gulf cannot be discounted. NIMASA, as the flag state administration and the body responsible for the welfare of Nigerian seafarers internationally, should be urgently engaging the IMO’s evacuation framework and establishing a roster of Nigerian crew members currently operating in the affected corridor.
NPA and port throughput. If Hormuz disruption persists and rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope becomes a sustained reality — as was seen during the Red Sea crisis — voyage durations lengthen, vessel turnaround times extend, and cargo arrival schedules at Nigerian ports including Apapa, Tin Can Island, and Lekki Deep Sea Port become less predictable. Port operators and freight forwarders should be stress-testing their scheduling assumptions accordingly.
Policy signal for Abuja.
The IMO’s push for a multilateral evacuation framework and its engagement of coastal states is a prompt for Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy to signal its position. Nigeria’s standing within IMO governance structures — and its aspirations for a greater blue economy leadership role — would be enhanced by a formal statement of support for the IMO Secretary-General’s position and by offering, where feasible, logistical or diplomatic cooperation within the West African sub-region.
The Nigerian Shippers’ Council should also be monitoring freight rate developments closely, as prolonged Hormuz disruption historically feeds through to elevated surcharges on Nigerian import and export cargo — a burden ultimately passed to shippers and consumers.
FIVE DEAD, 41 MISSING AS FIRE GUTS INDONESIAN FERRY CARRYING 271
By Raymond Gold | Waterways News
At least five people are dead and 41 others remain missing after a passenger ferry caught fire off Indonesia’s Madura Island on Sunday, triggering a major multi-agency search and rescue operation involving naval and civilian vessels.
The Mutiara Sentosa 2, sailing the roughly 40-hour Surabaya to Makassar route with 271 people on board, including 232 passengers and 39 crew members, caught fire between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time in waters off Sumenep regency, Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said. The vessel was also reportedly carrying 181 vehicles, mostly trucks, and an excavator.
About an hour after the blaze started, ferry operator PT Atosim Lampung Pelayaran alerted the Surabaya Search and Rescue Office, after the vessel’s captain radioed a distress report saying the ship was ablaze near the northern tip of Madura Island. Contact with the vessel was then lost.
By 9:45 a.m., rescuers had pinpointed the ferry’s location, roughly 19 nautical miles north of Buruan Sapudi Island, after reaching the nearby cargo ship Meratus Project 3. That vessel, however, could not approach the burning ferry closely because it was carrying a flammable load. A tugboat and another passing vessel became the first responders, beginning evacuations shortly before 10 a.m., before more ships joined the operation.
By Sunday afternoon, several nearby vessels had rescued 225 passengers and crew and recovered five bodies, with 41 people still unaccounted for. Basarnas dispatched a rescue vessel from Surabaya, though officials estimated a six-hour transit time to the scene, and a rigid inflatable boat sent from the Sumenep rescue post was forced to turn back due to rough seas and high waves. An Indonesian naval warship has since joined the search.
The cause of the fire has not been established and remains under investigation. It is the second major Indonesian maritime distress incident in as many months. Last month, rescuers searched for survivors after the KM Nurul Salsa suffered engine failure and sank, with five survivors, including a seven-year-old girl, recovered days later.
NIGERIA WATCH
Indonesia’s tragedy off Madura should sound familiar to anyone tracking Nigeria’s own inland and coastal waterways. Strip away the geography and the pattern is the same one that recurs on the Niger, the Benue and the Niger Delta creeks every rainy season. Overloaded or ill-equipped vessels, delayed distress reporting, and rescue assets that arrive too late or cannot reach the casualty at all.
The detail that should trouble Nigerian regulators most is the nearby cargo ship that could not assist the burning ferry because it was itself carrying flammable cargo. This is a reminder that firefighting capability, not just headcount, is the real test of vessel safety. NIMASA and NIWA have made real strides on the Seafarer Discharge Book digitization and the CVFF portal, but neither agency has articulated a clear standard for onboard fire-suppression systems on domestic ferries, particularly those plying the country’s inland waterways that operators like WABOTAN and ATBOWATON know well.
There is also a lesson for NIWA and LASWA in the response timeline. Indonesian rescuers, despite dispatching a navy warship and multiple agency assets, still needed roughly six hours to reach the vessel, and one rescue boat had to turn back in rough seas. Nigeria’s own record on Benue and Niger Delta boat accidents shows the same gap between a distress call and an effective response, a gap that NIWA’s enforcement push and the LASWA-Interferry Ferry Safety Development Programme are meant to close, but which will keep costing lives until vessel-side fire and lifesaving equipment compliance is treated with the same urgency as overloading and life-jacket enforcement.
Maritime Security and Safety
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
HORMUZ SHADOW FLEET: HOW A WAR-ZONE WORKAROUND IS QUIETLY KEEPING THE WORLD’S OIL MARKET ALIVE
By Oghenewoke Osaweren | Waterways News
Beneath the surface calm of a fragile Middle East ceasefire, a covert maritime operation is doing what diplomacy has not been able to do. It is keeping oil flowing out of the world’s most contested waterway. Tankers with their transponders deliberately switched off are meeting far offshore, transferring millions of barrels ship-to-ship, and disappearing back into commercial shipping lanes before regulators, insurers, or belligerents can react.
This is not a new tactic. It is the same “dark fleet” playbook sanctioned Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan crude have relied on for years. What has changed is who is now using it, and why a legitimate, US-escorted oil trade has been forced to borrow the tradecraft of sanctions evasion just to survive.
THE NUMBERS TELL A STORY OF FRAGILE NORMALITY
Satellite imagery over the Omani port of Sohar recorded at least seven tanker-pair transfers in a single day this week, several involving supertanker-class vessels capable of moving a combined 8 million barrels. Two weeks earlier, at the height of renewed US-Iran hostilities, that same stretch of water saw only two such transfers. The swing illustrates how tightly oil-market stability in 2026 is now tethered not to production levels, but to a handful of shipowners’ daily risk calculus.
Even with the rebound, flows remain a fraction of the roughly 20 million barrels a day that once transited the Strait of Hormuz before the war. US officials now put total Gulf exit volumes at around 13 million barrels daily, split roughly evenly between the strait itself and bypass pipelines built precisely to reduce dependence on Hormuz. American forces say they have personally escorted close to 500 million barrels out of the strait since May, a scale of military involvement in commercial shipping rarely seen outside declared war.
WHAT THIS MEANS BEYOND THE GULF
For Nigeria and other non-Gulf producers, a Hormuz shuttle trade that works, however imperfectly, is a double-edged development. It has so far kept a full-blown price shock at bay, with Brent oscillating between $80 and $100 rather than spiking uncontrollably, which shields Nigeria’s import-heavy fuel supply chain and naira-denominated energy costs from the worst-case scenario. But it also means Gulf producers are adapting fast enough to defend their market share even under bombardment, a resilience that could blunt any window Nigerian and West African crude grades might otherwise have gained as buyers hedged away from Hormuz-dependent barrels.
There is also a governance dimension worth flagging for Nigerian maritime observers. The same AIS-dark, ship-to-ship transfer tactics now legitimising emergency oil flows out of the Gulf are structurally identical to the techniques long used for illegal bunkering and crude theft in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea. When a G7 navy escorts and effectively normalises transponder-dark transfers as sound commercial practice under conflict conditions, it complicates the international case for treating the same behaviour as inherently criminal in West African waters, an inconsistency Nigerian regulators and NIMASA may eventually have to reckon with.
A MARKET RUNNING ON DELAYED CARGOES, NOT CONFIDENCE
Perhaps the clearest sign of how strained the system remains: buyers of Emirati crude, including cargoes tied to ADNOC tenders, are only now receiving shipments that were due weeks ago, some having incurred demurrage costs on ships hired to collect oil that never showed up on schedule. ADNOC’s shipping unit has itself had to book a tanker for a Sohar ship-to-ship pickup, effectively routing its own state oil company’s cargo through the same shadow logistics used to dodge attacks.
The picture that emerges is not one of a market that has stabilised, but of a market that has adapted to instability, one satellite pass at a time.
Maritime Security and Safety
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Search Continues for 17 Missing as Vietnamese Cargo Vessel Sinks in South China Sea
Rescuers are still combing waters near a contested reef system in the South China Sea after a Vietnamese-flagged cargo vessel went down over the weekend, leaving 17 crew members unaccounted for.
Of the 62 people who were aboard the vessel, the Khoi Nguyen 18, when it ran into difficulty, 45 have so far been pulled to safety, Vietnamese officials confirmed.
According to Chinese state media, the roughly 70-metre freighter got into trouble close to Yongshu Reef, also called Fiery Cross Reef, off China’s Hainan province. A Chinese rescue vessel, the Nanhai Jiu 115, first picked up what appeared to be a distress flare from the stricken ship on Saturday evening, shortly before 6:30pm local time.
The search-and-rescue effort has drawn in a sizeable multinational response: six Chinese vessels, a rescue helicopter, and a Vietnamese ship have all joined the operation, state news agency Xinhua reported.
A flashpoint waterway
The sinking adds to safety concerns in one of the world’s most disputed maritime zones. China claims sovereignty over the vast majority of the South China Sea — a position an international tribunal rejected in a landmark 2016 ruling brought by the Philippines.
Among the most contentious areas are the Spratly Islands (known in China as the Nansha Islands), where Beijing has built airstrips and fortified artificial islands. China’s claims overlap with those of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and Taiwan, making the region a persistent source of regional friction and, as this incident shows, a challenging one for maritime emergency response.
Search efforts were ongoing at the time of filing.
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