According to Dr Okello, annually, the city council buries over 80 unclaimed bodies and spends quarterly 4.4 million shillings on burial expenses alone.
Gulu City Council authorities
have raised complaints over the increasing number of bodies from neighbouring
districts that go unclaimed at the Gulu Regional Referral Hospital
Morgue.
According to the officials, at least
two bodies are unclaimed every week in the city morgue and are mostly abandoned by Police from neighbouring
districts of Omoro, and Amuru with some from Nwoya.
The bodies are mostly victims of
road crashes, mob justices and to a minor extent those admitted to the facility
with chronic illnesses but abandoned by relatives or caretakers.
Patrick Ogwang, acting Principal
Health Officer in charge of environmental health says the city is constrained
by the trend which needs immediate intervention from the neighboring district
leaders.
Ogwang notes that some of the
victims are brought for postmortem but are abandoned by the police at the
mortuary leaving the burden of preserving and burial with the regional referral
hospital and city council.
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According to Ogwang, the growing
cases have put pressure on the already meagre resources of the city council to
meet the burial expenses for the unclaimed bodies.
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Monthly according to city
officials, the city council pays a contractor 170,000 shillings per unclaimed body
for burial at the city cemetery in Pageya ward in Pece-Laroo Division. This is exclusive
of allowances and fuel costs incurred in transportation.
Dr Daniel Okello, Gulu City
Health Officer says the situation is being exacerbated by the limited space at
the Gulu Regional Referral Hospital Morgue. The mortuary fridge only accommodates eight dead bodies.
Dr Okello says due to limited space, victims of road crashes or mob justice with mangled bodies are sometimes buried in a hurry if unclaimed in days since they decompose faster.
According to Dr Okello, annually,
the city council buries over 80 unclaimed bodies and spends quarterly 4.4
million shillings on burial expenses alone.
For instance, Okello says the city
council plans every quarter for at least 20 unclaimed bodies for burial. Each of
the unclaimed bodies costs 170,000 shillings, including 50,000 shillings for transport
and undisclosed allowances for the casual workers. In total, he
says an unclaimed body cost the city council about 230,000 Shillings in
expenses for burial.
Walter Uryek-Wun, the Principal
Assistant Secretary at Gulu Regional Referral Hospital says the bureaucracy of
having an unclaimed body taken out of the mortuary for burial has caused
inconveniences in the preservation of remains.
According to Uryek-wun, the
Hospital has to go through all the legal processes that entail announcing for a
week on radio stations and formally notifying the City council authorities who
sometimes don’t intervene immediately even after a month.
Gulu City relies on its only cemetery
located in Atede B cell, Pageya Ward, in the Pece-Laroo Division. The cemetery
sits on a two-acre piece of land which city authorities say is small given the
increasing numbers of unclaimed bodies being buried.
Already, the city council has
earmarked 80.6 million shillings towards establishing a perimeter wall around
the cemetery for security, and to avert encroachment by neighbours.
Leaders in the city are however
courting their neighbours to consider budgets for the establishment of their mortuaries
and cemeteries to excuse them from the high expenses of preserving and burying
unclaimed bodies.
In the neighbouring Omoro
district, health officials have already come out with proposals for
constructing their mortuary and establishing a cemetery.
Dr Stephen Oringtho, the Omoro
District Health Officer during a recent budget conference explained that police
have often been stranded with dead bodies due to the lack of a mortuary and
highlighted the critical need for a local mortuary.
