By Mabinty Kamara
Recently there have persistent reports of unidentified corpses been abandoned on the streets of Freetown. In some cases dead bodies have been on the streets for more than two days, posing serious health risk to residents.
The latest such incidents happened at Fifth Street, off Mountain Cut, where it took a noisy protest by some youths of the area to have the body of a man which had been abandoned for three days taken away. The youths displayed the body on the main street of Mountain Cut causing traffic jam, which prompted the authorities to act.
About a week earlier a similar incident had happen in Kingtom in the west end of Freetown, where youths similarly barricaded the highway forcing the authorities to remove an abandoned corpse.
Zainab Zubairu, a resident of Fifth Street in Mountain Cut, recalled that even before the death of the man they called on both the police and the city council for help.
“When he finally died, we called on them again to remove the body. They still did not come. So when the body was about to decompose, knowing the health hazards that it will pose if left unattended, our boys did what they could to get the attention of those concern,” Ms Zubairu told Politico.
Other residents insisted that if the youths had not done what they did, the body would have remained there until it made the whole community uncomfortable to live in.
An elderly woman, a resident of the Mountain Cut community, who identified herself as Mrs Taylor, said: “if those boys hadn’t block their ways they [officials] would not have taken the issue seriously since they were not the ones being affected.”
Some of the youths who spoke to Politico said they didn’t find pleasure in causing trouble but that they felt their actions were justifiable.
“We did what we did to liberate our community from the health hazards that we saw coming. They say the youths are lawless but have they looked into some of the reasons behind the lawlessness? How can you leave dead body unburied in a community?” asked Ahmed, one of the youths.
The Death and Destitute Association (DDA) has been responsible for the collection and burial of unidentified dead bodies within the Freetown municipality. The organization, which is attached to the Mortuary at the Connaught Hospital in Freetown, comprises of volunteers and they are headed by an employee at the Coroner’s office. They, as in almost all such cases, eventually responded to the calls from the youths of Fifth Street.
The DDA was founded in January 2004. Sinneh Kamara, its founder and coordinator, said they formed the organization even before the government established the office of the coroner which should be responsible for the collection of destitute and proving the cause of their death.
Kamara said over a decade later, they are still struggling to get the requisite support from the government.
Accordingly, the Freetown City Council is supposed to be responsible for the burial of unidentified bodies. But the DDA coordinator said they hardly do so, leaving the job in the hands of his team.
“I use my personal resources to carry out the operations. I have volunteers working with me some are students, some are not, but we don’t have support,” Kamara said, adding that they had made countless requests to the FCC for support. He said the Council had always said they had no budget for that.
Kamara and his team have access to only one ambulance, and he said even to fuel it is often a major problem.
He said if they had all the necessary logistics in place, there wouldn’t arose the issue of dead bodies lying “here and there” on streets. He also spoke about the need for a communication line as it was during the Ebola outbreak when people called to report cases of deaths.
Currently, because of the condition under which his organization operates, Kamara said they have been burying unidentified bodies in mass graves. He said they did not like it that way but that they have no choice.
Such burials are important to decongest the Connaught mortuary, said officials.
The DDA had its last mass burial at the end of last month, during which some 26 bodies were buried at the Kingtom Cemetery.
The bodies were 20 males and six females. Many of them were said to have died from road accidents, some of them victims of hit-and-run.
There were stab wounds on some others, suggesting they were victims of violent attacks, said Kamara.
“If we have the required support, they will be buried in separate graves with their identities displayed on their tombs,” he said.
(C) Politico 05/04/16
