Lusaka council to clean up cemeteries

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 09:21:42 +0000

By MAILESI BANDA

 THE Lusaka City Council (LCC) has approved the engagement of 120 temporal workers to slash grass around the Leopards Hill, Chunga and Chingwele public cemeteries in the city.

LCC public relations manager, Habeenzu Mulunda, said 60 would work on the Leopard’s Hill gravesite while Chingwele and Chunga will have 30 each.

Reacting to an appeal from mourners at the Leopards Hill that the local authority should maintain the cemeteries, Mr. Mulunda said the council slashed grass around the graves once every year.

Last week mourners at Lusaka’s Leopards Hill cemetery appealed to Lusaka City Council to hire workers to clean the cemetery.

Speaking in an interview with the Daily Nation, Stella Lubona of Bauleni compound said the state of the graves especially during the rainy season was unbearable.

Mrs. Lubona said the bushes surrounding the graves were now havens for snakes that would one day attack mourners.

She said she was once almost bitten by a snake when she attended a neighbour’s funeral at the burial site.

“I was almost bitten by a snake the last time I came here. I was seated on a tombstone and nearby was a bush and then suddenly I heard something move in the grass and when I looked it was a snake, I was so scared,” she said.

She explained that the snake brought confusion to the funeral procession as immediately she saw it she screamed and this caused other mourners to scamper in different directions.

She said the city council did not maintain the graves despite being paid for the allocation of the grave spaces.

But Mr. Mulunda said the situation would soon change as the grass slashers would soon be on site. “I am aware that the council has approved to engage temporal workers to slash around all the three public cemeteries in Lusaka. Normally we do the slashing at the graves annually,’’  he said.