While not as numerous as in 2024, the ”known” passenger vessel fatalities for 2025 revealed by the Baird Maritime Passenger Vessel Accident (BMPVA) database were still worse than in 2023.
The strong efforts of the governments of the “willing” civilised states in Asia continue to be far outweighed by the negligent disinterest of two particular African “failed” states: the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.
The total of 1,455 fatalities from 50 accidents in 2025 is a definite improvement on the appalling 2,033 fatalities from 55 accidents in 2024 but is still significantly worse than the 1,308 fatalities recorded from 39 accidents in 2023.
As usual, the DRC was the worst performer even though it did improve from 950 known fatalities from 11 accidents in 2024 to 807 fatalities from six accidents last year. Similarly, the still horrifying Nigeria improved from 423 fatalities involving 13 accidents to 292 deaths from seven accidents in 2025.
Of course, human errors remain, by far, probably more than 99 per cent of the causes of fatal ferry and tour boat accidents. Almost all are the result of overloading, collisions and allisions, fires and poor seamanship. All can be largely prevented by effective regulation and rigorous enforcement.
The dramatic improvements in passenger vessel safety achieved in other “developing” countries such as China, the Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh clearly show how lives can be saved when national governments develop the will to do make that happen.
Once the worst in the world, those four countries, except for Indonesia, barely registered on the BMPVA database in 2025. Even Indonesia has improved dramatically over the last decade.
Generally, Asian countries have regulated sensibly and enforced those vessel safety regulations very rigorously in recent years. They have taken the problem very seriously and regulated accordingly and effectively.
The success of their efforts led to the creation of the Model Regulations for Domestic Ferry Safety finally promulgated in 2020, after years of frustrating lobbying by the author and others. It is the International Maritime Organisation's (IMO) sole achievement with respect to the problem.
The regulations are in a “ready to go” package and need no re-invention or re-writing. They can be seamlessly integrated into the existing safety legislation of willing and interested nations. They are a welcome but very rare example of domestic ferry safety proactivity on the part of the IMO.
Meanwhile, of course, the “woke joke,” that I described IMO as last year, continues to preach but not practice passenger vessel safety improvement. The IMO remains in its impressive ”coward’s castle” beside the Thames in London – except when it organises impractical “talk fests” in exotic locations – and still claims that it cannot interfere in the internal affairs of its sovereign member states.
In typically impractical United Nations style, it pretends to be assisting by funding expensive safety seminars and conferences in Africa that largely attract the usual already well-rewarded and self-serving “experts” who talk loudly but achieve little.
Even worse, the IMO claims to help by throwing inexperienced and largely ineffectual academics from its World Maritime University at the problem for which they have so far failed to offer any practical solutions. They simply “muddy” the ferry safety waters.
Those expensive conferences throw up impossibly costly and impractical solutions that essentially just “re-invent the wheel” in terms of vessel design, construction, and equipment in ways that are unaffordable in poor countries.
Meanwhile, years of detailed BMPVA data show the safety problem remains unquestionably a human problem, not a mechanical or a structural one. As in the Philippines, China and Bangladesh, it can only be solved by modifying human behaviour through better regulations that are effectively enforced. The IMO could best assist with that by helping poor countries' governments introduce and enforce its own model regulations.
From my long-term observation of its domestic passenger vessel safety “achievements”, I have concluded that it would be better for the IMO to cease its interfering, expensive, and completely impractical efforts except for using its undoubted influence to assist the sovereign independent governments of poor countries to introduce its existing model regulations.
Those governments could well be further goaded and pushed by NGOs and industry associations such as Interferry. If it truly seeks to help, the IMO could provide some practical assistance by funding but not trying to manage such efforts.
I reiterate what I said last year: “Such sovereign member nations as Nigeria and the DRC are some of the worst failed states on the planet. They are ungoverned, ungovernable, and hopelessly corrupt. They have absolutely no hope at all of solving their ferry safety problems themselves. Someone or some organisation will have to do it for them or they will continue to kill thousands of their innocent citizens in ferry 'accidents'. "
Obviously, the African situation continues to deteriorate while the IMO fiddles and pretends, hopelessly impractically, to assist. Meanwhile, anyone travelling by ferry in too many African countries takes his or her life in their hands.
The solutions, though, are obvious and have been clearly illustrated by the improvements achieved in several Asian countries. They don’t need to be re-invented by incompetents at expensive IMO conferences in exotic locations in Africa.
Africa clearly is the main ferry safety problem region, but further afield, mainly in Southeast Asia and South America, there is a worryingly increasing trend in tourist boat fatalities. That is probably a result of rapidly increasing tourism in such places and, perhaps also, thanks to the internet in increased reporting of such incidents.
However, while they each usually result in small numbers of fatalities, largely because the boats involved are usually small, they represented 34 per cent of the accidents recorded in the BMPVA database in 2025. All the usual causes apply but they are worsened by a worrying negligent “cowboy” attitude that seems too common among the operators of such boats. That requires urgent government attention in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Peru, and Vietnam.
Finally, some good news. Only three fatalities were recorded on the BMPVA database as having occurred on cruise ships during 2025. One was a murder and the other was an apparent suicide, so it is hardly the fault of the ship owners or their crews. The other, sadly, was the loss of a passenger on a shore excursion. That may have resulted from crew negligence.
Overall, 2025 showed starkly that, despite improvements in the developed and developing world, much remains to be done to improve passenger vessel safety, particularly in poor countries. Improvements, however, can be achieved, quite rapidly, if governments develop the will to introduce sensible safety regulations and enforce them rigorously.
