Debmarine Namibia chief operating officerMaenge Shipiki-Kali says compliance with mining and maritime regulations is no longer sufficient to protect employees from fatal and life-altering incidents.
Shipiki-Kali said the marine diamond miner remains subject to an extensive regulatory regime covering Namibian labour, mining and shipping laws, as well as International Maritime Organisation requirements, but had concluded that compliance represented only the starting point of effective safety management.
“We are a compliant culture in terms of regulations. We comply with the Namibian regulations. We also comply with the International Maritime Organisation. In terms of safety of lives at sea, maritime labour, we are highly regulated. So we are compliant. But compliant is not sufficient for us. We need to be more than just compliant. So compliant is basic,” Shipiki-Kali said.
Shipiki-Kali said Debmarine’s operations face risks that differ substantially from those of land-based mines because employees work on vessels operating about 30 kilometres offshore, where they must contend with deep water, changing weather conditions and the hazards associated with marine mining equipment.
She said the company’s safety journey began taking clearer shape in 2010 through its “road to zero harm”, initially focusing on safety, health, environment and security observations and later on fatal-risk controls intended to identify the events capable of killing employees.
However, the company’s approach was also shaped by a fatality recorded in 2008, when a worker named Nicolas Clute died aboard a vessel Kalii was managing.
“That death would stay with me. The guy was from Port Nolloth, was working on a tug. Nicolas Cloete. I had to drive to Port Nolloth for his funeral. I had to meet his twin brother, his mother and his family. That would stay with me. It has informed how I feel about safety. It is personal. You have got skin in the game,” she said.
By 2017, Debmarine’s leadership had become concerned that its focus on lost-time injuries and compliance was not adequately addressing the events capable of causing fatalities.
Shipiki-Kali said the company subsequently partnered with the Institute for Training and Development to assess its safety culture and psychological safety, with about 800 employees interviewed as part of the process.
The findings challenged management’s view of its own safety performance.
“What we found is that we were mostly compliant, also reactive, a little bit proactive. In our minds, we thought that we were better than that, to be honest. We were shocked to see that the feedback that we got from the workforce was telling us that you are not as good as you think that you are,” Shipiki-Kali said.
She said the company introduced structured discussions in which senior managers, operators, plant hands and deck hands participate as equals and can challenge management where they believe an unsafe act is taking place.
“Around that table everybody is equal. There is no CEO. The plant hand is equal to our CEO around that table. The plant hand or the operator or the deck hand can give their opinion where they disagree and where they think management is also exhibiting some unsafe act,” she said.
Shipiki-Kali said this was particularly important in a marine environment where employees must ordinarily follow the captain’s commands, but still need the confidence to raise concerns and halt work when safety is at risk.
Debmarine also changed the risks it focused on, moving away from devoting most of its attention to minor observations and towards what it calls priority unwanted events, including hazardous materials, fire, launch and recovery operations, structural failures, loss of power, and helicopter operations.
“It could not be that safety and we are separate. They had to be part of this process,” Kalii said.
Once critical controls had been identified, Debmarine introduced systems to alert the responsible manager or risk owner whenever a control was not checked or had failed.
“When you go and do a job, you have a paper that tells you, here are your critical controls. If this is not in place, it is a no-go. And if it is a no-go, that is your stop-work authority,” Shipiki-Kali said.
She said Debmarine also identified behaviours that would attract disciplinary action, including deliberately disregarding controls related to high-risk activities such as safeguarding, confined spaces, hot work, and lifting.
“Compliance is unacceptable for us. It is something that we do not accept,” she said, adding that Debmarine’s definition of zero harm now concentrates primarily on preventing fatalities and life-altering injuries.
The company subsequently trained employees across its vessels to actively search for high-impact risks through a programme involving what it calls safety sentries, while technical personnel and managers conduct further pressure-testing of critical controls through teams known as delta commanders.
“If something happens, whose fault is that then? It is not on the person who is doing the work. It is on me, it is on us. So we try and take care of that through design,” she said.
Debmarine no longer describes the programme simply as a safety maturity journey, but as a journey to resilience that covers safety, risk, work systems, leadership, and employees’ ability to respond to changing conditions.
“We actually say journey to resilience, meaning it encompasses everything. It is not just safety, it is risk, it is work, it is everything. It is in all spheres. So the key thing for us is the fact that everyone is a safety leader.
“The human being is the strongest link because we are too far to manage the team. The systems must be agile and everybody must be ready to respond. Psychological safety is a requirement, and there is no end to the journey,” she said.
