If the Kisumu County government gets its way, families in Kisumu will no longer be allowed to bury their dead within the estates.
According to the acting city manager, Abala Wanga, the county government is in the process of passing a law to ensure that bodies are buried away from estates even if landowners have title deeds.
Target estates and slums are Manyatta, Obunga, Nyalenda, Bamdani and Mamboleo where families have been burying their loved ones for decades.
Speaking to the press, Wanga said that the county government “is working on a bill to be tabled to the assembly” to stop such burials.
The acting manager said that the Kisumu City Board is working closely with the County Assembly to enact a law to end estate burials.
According to Wanga, residents are supposed to bury their loved ones at the gazetted cemetery in Mamboleo or transport remains back to the rural areas for burial.
During a clean-up operation in Nyalenda, Wanga said that “Everybody who came to Kisumu must be ready to ferry their loved ones home for burial if they don’t want to bury at the cemetery,”
According to the acting city boss, physical planning, including road construction in the future might be hampered if the spate of burials within the city is not controlled or stopped.
The view of the county government is that everyone in Kisumu must have come from somewhere in the rural areas and that if bodies cannot be buried in Mamboleo, they need to be taken to the rural areas for burial.
The implication is that those whose rural homes are within Kisumu county and who own land within the county have to bury their dead in Mamboleo or face the law.
Opponents of the new law were however of the view that the County government needs to be sensitive with Luo culture which stipulates that the remains of a deceased person must be buried in his or her rural home.
According to Dan Abura, a teacher, “it has to be recognised that before Kisumu became a town and then a city, it was a rural home to thousands of people who still live in Manyatta, Nyalenda, Obunga and Pandpieri areas. To force these people to bury their dead in a cemetery in Mamboleo might have far-reaching consequences”.
According to the Luo culture, a dead person’s spirit might return to bewitch the living if not accorded proper burial rights. This situation might not be considered by the proposed law because legislation is unlikely to consider matters that border on superstition.
It will be interesting to see how the County government handles the issue once the law is enacted. Preventing people from burying their dead at their designated homes where they are title-deed holders might be challenging.
