Two years since they returned home, Ghana sailors finally get salaries

The sailors in Mazgaon Dockyard in 2016

THERE HAVE been no celebrations in four households in the coastal city of Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana for two years till their bank accounts finally saw the dues being credited less than a month ago. Since then, the families have celebrated their first Eid in close to a decade. “We have faced a lot of hardship but now we are enjoying being with our families,” said Issah Sawudu, who until two years ago was the second engineer aboard the vessel MV Seabulk Plover. Its sale last month paved way for Sawudu and his colleagues to receive salaries that had been delayed since 2009.

Sawudu, Mustapha Mohammad, Iddriss Mohammad and Abakah Francis were part of the crew of the Plover, a tugboat that was pulling the decommissioned ship, MV Wisdom, to India from Sri Lanka when the cable tying the vessels together snapped in the middle of a storm, causing the latter to drift and run aground at Juhu beach in May 2011.

After their arrest and subsequent release, the men were stranded on board their vessel that crashed into Butcher Island, a few kilometers away from the mainland. As months went by, the vessel lost electricity and water and food also ran out. The men spent the next five years surviving on food donated by passing fishermen and the National Union of Seafarers of India.

In 2015, the union had moved the Bombay High Court against Magnum V, the owners of the vessel. On June 22, 2016, the men were able to set foot on land for the first time in five years and return to Ghana with the help of Inspector Cyrus Irani of the Mumbai Police’s Immigration Bureau. This was after the court ordered the ship to be sold for scrap and the shipping firm to pay their salaries.

Even so, the sailors have had to endure an agonising wait of two years before the vessel was finally sold to Mumbai-based Rajnish Steels for Rs 1.30 crore on July 11. From July 26, the money began to trickle into their bank accounts after the Mumbai Sheriff’s office made the transaction. Sawudu received $ 61,680, Mustapha got $ 37,400 and Francis and Idriss got $ 35,019 each. Sawudu’s received the money on July 31, the day his son Jaob was born.

“It is not as much as we expected but we are very happy. We celebrated Eid-al-Adha after a very long time and could provide something for our families,” Mustapha told The Indian Express from Ghana.

Next week, their children will rejoin school after a six-year long gap, as bankruptcy had forced them to stop their education and survive by selling their homes and borrowing money from friends and family. “No one wanted to help us except our families and friends. We have now started paying them back. We appreciate what the Indian court, our lawyer and NUSI have done for us,” said Mustapha.

Advocate Abhishek Khare, who represented the men, said: “Seeing that they have got what they are entitled to makes me happy.”

NUSI general secretary Abdul Ghani Serang said the men were able to survive that long on the ship in spite of having to strip its wooden parts to make fires, simply because they hadn’t abandoned hope. “The vessel was a rustbucket but the men had hope that one day they would make it out, that the ship would be sold and that they would see their families.”