Shara Community Complains of overcrowded Cemetery amid Fight Over Graves

PAYNESVILLE – The head of the local leadership in Shara Community, Duport Road, says the cemetery in the community is now full to capacity due to illegal burial by some citizens in the area; an action which he said is posing a health hazard to residents of the community.

According to Chairman Godfrey Johnson, the Paynesville City Corporation (PCC) closed the cemetery since 2017 as a means of preventing illness from the community and nearby areas, but some citizens are carrying on secret burial.

Johnson, is at the same time calling on the citizens to desist from secret burial or risk drastic punishment.

At the same time, the leadership of the Community has vowed to carry out a robust exercise aimed at putting a stop to the ongoing secret burial.

“The problem about this cemetery is posting serious health hazard to us, the dwellers of this community. Those who are interest partners to this community has had generational family who have live here and their parents are aware that the cemetery is full,” chairman Johnson said. 

He accused some community dwellers who have parcel of land near the cemetery of selling to people for burial.     

Also speaking, another resident of the Shara Community, Thelma B. Tarpeh, said the overcrowding of the cemetery has made it difficult for families to identified their deceased relatives’ graves. Madam Tarpeh stressed the for an urgent intervention by the national government to intervene and address this aged-old problem.

Speaking further, she pointed out that her statement is based on a lingering confusion between her and a lady over claims of a graveyard. She said the lady is claiming that the spot used to buried her (Tarpeh) late husband on November 8, 2022 was the same spot she used to bury her son in 2013.

Explaining in tears, Madam Tarpeh noted that she bought the spot when there was no grave, but later got into a heated debate for ownership of the site.

She wants the local leadership to prevent others from burling in the area as a means of avoiding the recurrence of fighting during decoration adding skeleton heads was the only thing seen in the cemetery.