By Adama Makasuba
In its quest to address the plight and better conditions of dockworkers at the ports, the Gambia Maritime Dockworkers Union has made a move to get its own operational company next month as a short-term subsidiary of Gambia Ports Authority for two years.
The Dock Labour Company of the Gambia was designed by a Ghana’s firm called Benom Consultancy, and it will start operational at a sum of D10 million in early April.
The Gambia Ports Authority’s Managing Director, Ousman Jobarteh informed reporters that the new company is part of the reformation process in a bid to address the plights faced with dockworkers at the ports.
“We have been having problems as a management in providing quality services to the users’ while the dockworkers also have a perennial issue affecting their management, welfare issues and wages. So, management noticed that the problems have been there for a long time and the most sustainable way to address them is to let the workers have a stake in the operation of onboard labour,” he said.
According to him, “we expect the company to grow, maybe, for the next two years when the company is in full fledge and that we are comfortable with the operation, the GPA which holds part of the shareholding – fifty-fifty in the beginning, we will gradually withdraw from the company and allow the dockworkers to own it fully.”
Lang Bala Sawo, President of Gambia Maritime Dockworkers Union, welcomed the move and said it will greatly help in addressing the longstanding plights of dockworkers at the ports.
“And 99% of revenues that GPA earns came from the stevedore office and yet the dockworkers are the poorest.The Gambia Ports Authority’s staffs are having risk allowance but the dockworkers don’t. And it is us who climb five containers up and some get serious life-threatening injuries through that sometimes,” Lang disclosed at the organised news conference held in Banjul on Sunday.
“But this company will be here to address all those problems. We don’t have social security, it was pension scheme and we want to get social security scheme. Just look at me I am in my 60s and still working as a dockworker,” he said. Despite he’s in his 60s he couldn’t retire because the dockworkers have no social security to benefit from after retirement.
“GPA is not paying us, it is the shipping agency that is paying, but the money goes to GPA they will convert it local currency to pay us. However, Dockworkers Union is being here for a long time, it was established in 1953,” he explained.
