Maritime Security and Safety
Stakeholders Cry Out as Stowaways Adopt New Tactics, Navy Nabs Eight in Four Months
Stakeholders Cry Out as Stowaways Adopt New Tactics, Navy Nabs Eight in Four Months
Industry operators warn of rising financial and reputational costs as experts call for external vessel checks, SPOMO Act review
By Ighoyota Onaibre | Waterways News Reporter, Lagos
Maritime stakeholders have sounded a fresh alarm over the growing sophistication of stowaway operations in Nigerian waters, as the Nigerian Navy confirmed the interception of at least eight stowaways in separate operations between January and April 2026 — a trend that is drawing concern from shipping companies, legal experts, and port security authorities alike.
The arrests, disclosed through a series of naval press statements and media briefings, point to an escalating security challenge at Lagos anchorage and along Nigeria’s coastal corridors — one that operators say is increasingly difficult to contain using conventional onboard security protocols.
Eight Arrests, Three Incidents
Naval authorities — particularly the Commander of Nigerian Navy Ship (NNS) Beecroft, Commodore Aiwuyor Adams-Aliu — confirmed three distinct interceptions in the period under review.
In March 2026, naval operatives on routine patrol intercepted two stowaways concealed aboard a vessel off the Lagos coast. The suspects were handed over to relevant authorities for investigation.
In early April, three Ghanaian nationals were arrested after illegally boarding a Europe-bound vessel in Lagos — an incident that naval authorities said underscored the continued use of Nigerian ports as departure points for irregular migration to Europe.
Days later, in mid-April, three more stowaways were apprehended aboard the merchant vessel MSC Stella near the Lagos Fairway Buoy, again while attempting to travel unlawfully to Europe before being detected during security checks.
Commodore Adams-Aliu, addressing journalists at one of the briefings, reaffirmed the Navy’s commitment to securing Nigeria’s territorial waters and warned that stowaway attempts pose grave safety risks and constitute violations of international maritime regulations. Naval sources indicate the total number of interceptions in 2026 may exceed the eight independently verified cases.
Shipping Companies Bear the Brunt
The Shipping Association of Nigeria (SAN) Chairman, Mrs Boma Alabi, has raised concerns over the mounting operational and financial toll on shipping companies. Speaking at a recent stakeholders’ meeting in Lagos, Alabi noted that shipping agents continue to grapple with stowaways boarding vessels undetected, causing delays in vessel departures as investigations and disembarkation procedures are carried out.
She highlighted the compounding financial liabilities involved — including fines, diversion costs, additional crew management responsibilities, and reputational damage to Nigeria as a port of origin — and called for stronger, better-coordinated port security measures, improved inter-agency collaboration, and a clear responsibility framework that shields shipping companies from bearing liability for what are fundamentally security failures.
“Shipping companies are often held responsible for situations that are largely security-related and beyond their operational control,” Alabi stated.
The Rudder Problem: A Shift in Stowaway Tactics
Perhaps the most telling insight into the shifting nature of the stowaway threat came from a former President of the Nigerian Merchant Navy Officers and Water Transport Senior Staff Association (NMNOWTSSA), Engr. Matthew Alalade, who told Waterways News that the days of stowaways hiding inside vessels are largely over — and that the industry has not fully adapted to what has replaced it.
“You hardly find stowaways inside the vessel anymore because onboard security is tight. What we are seeing now is people coming through small boats and hanging on the rudder,” Alalade explained.
He advised that shipping companies and agents must now adopt proactive external inspection measures — including deploying speedboats to check vessel undersides before departure, particularly when ships are riding high on light loads, which makes rudder compartments more accessible.
Alalade also sought to clarify the legal framework governing stowaways discovered at sea, stressing that international maritime practice strictly prohibits any harm to stowaways.
“There is no right to throw anyone overboard. The standard procedure is to report to the next port and hand the person over to authorities,” he said.
He also raised concerns about the Suppression of Piracy and Other Maritime Offences (SPOMO) Act, suggesting that portions of the legislation may no longer be fit for purpose in addressing current stowaway tactics and calling for a legislative review to reflect present-day realities.
Legal Framework: No Room for Extrajudicial Action
Maritime lawyer and immediate past Chairman of the Institute of Chartered Ship Brokers (ICS), Dr Chris Ebare, reinforced the legal position on stowaway handling, emphasising that throwing stowaways overboard is a serious criminal offence under both Nigerian law and international maritime conventions.
“To the best of my knowledge, there is no law that permits a captain to throw a stowaway into the sea. Such actions would amount to a serious offence,” Ebare stated. “It is not a case of jungle justice. Maritime laws and international conventions are clear on how such situations should be handled.”
Ebare maintained that the SPOMO Act provides clear penalties for maritime offences, and that all stowaways must be handed over to the relevant authorities for lawful prosecution — not subjected to extrajudicial treatment. He added that while enforcement of maritime laws in Nigeria is ongoing, greater consistency and wider awareness remain essential to deter violations.
Nigeria Watch
The eight stowaway arrests recorded in Nigeria’s waters in just four months of 2026 are more than a security statistic — they represent a serious governance gap at the port-vessel interface that risks eroding Nigeria’s standing as a reliable maritime hub.
The emerging shift to rudder-compartment concealment signals that conventional onboard security measures, however tight, are no longer sufficient. Port security agencies — including the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), NIMASA, and naval patrols — must now contend with threats that originate outside the vessel perimeter, in open water, before boarding ever occurs. This calls for a rethinking of pre-departure inspection protocols and a wider deployment of patrol assets at anchorage points and fairway approaches.
For NIMASA, which bears statutory responsibility for maritime safety and security under its enabling legislation, the rising stowaway trend also raises questions about the adequacy of Port State Control and vessel clearance procedures. The agency’s collaboration with NNS Beecroft and other naval formations will need to intensify if Nigeria is to close the loopholes currently being exploited.
The SAN’s call for a clear liability framework deserves urgent regulatory attention. Shipping lines — many of whom are foreign-flagged operators whose continued calls at Lagos are commercially discretionary — should not be penalised for systemic port security failures. A fairer responsibility matrix, backed by stronger agency coordination, is the foundation on which Nigeria’s port competitiveness ultimately rests.
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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