As Tanzania mourns those drowned in the ferry disaster off the island of Zanzibar on 10 September questions are being asked once again about the safety of the country’s passenger boats.
So far the death toll is 197, with most of these still unidentified on Sunday. President Jakaya Kikwete has asked for DNA testing to be used to identify the dead. He has announced three days of national mourning and has cancelled a trip to Canada.
The boat, which was travelling between Zanzibar and Pemba to the north, was licensed to carry 600 passengers and about 500 were on the ship’s manifest, according to the Zanzibar police commissioner’s announcement early on Saturday morning.
But it is thought that more than 800 were on board and “The Citizen”, Tanzania’s main daily newspaper, is estimating that there may have been between 1,000 and 1,500. The BBC has reported that numerous passengers disembarked before the boat, the Spice Islander, left port because they felt it was unsafe. It was already leaning when it left port and it sank off of Nungwi, a beach resort in the north of Zanzibar island, in the early hours of Saturday morning. Darkness made the search for survivors difficult and it is thought that the delay and over-exposure in the sea, combined with the fast currents in the area, may have been the cause of many of the deaths.
Ferries between the semi-autonomous Spice Islands, as they are sometimes called, are old, badly maintained and always overcrowded. Only last month the Zanzibar administration announced that it would invest in better vessels.
This is the second worst maritime disaster in Tanzania’s history. In a previous tragedy on Lake Victoria in 1996 almost 900 people were drowned when a ferry sank with 1,000 passengers on board. Little has been done since then to improve the country’s maritime safety.
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