Femi Atoyebi, Mudiaga Affe, Femi Makinde, Success Nwogu and Gbenro Adeoye
Numbers of unclaimed corpses are rising
in the mortuaries of public hospitals across the country as families
abandon the bodies of loved ones, an investigation by Saturday PUNCH has revealed.
In some cases, it was learnt that
families who had spent a lot of money taking care of sick relations,
simply abandoned them when they died.
Some mortuary attendants told our
correspondents that the relatives of many of such deceased persons no
longer pick their calls. Also compounding the number of unclaimed
corpses are those of mentally challenged victims who died on the street
as well as accident victims and suspected armed robbers killed by
security agents.
The situation is so dire in Cross River
State that over 1,000 unclaimed corpses are currently in public and
private mortuaries in the state, Saturday PUNCH learnt.
Authorities of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital had in 2013 buried over 200 unclaimed corpses in a mass grave.
The Calabar General Hospital in 2015 also buried over 100 corpses for lack of space.
Apart from accident victims, the bulk of
corpses were abandoned by dubious relatives who provided fake contact
addresses after depositing the dead bodies, it was learnt.
A private mortician operating in Ikom
Local Government Area of the state, Mr. Emeka Ben-Chima, decried the
health risk constituted by the high number of corpses abandoned in
mortuaries across the state.
Ben-Chima said that over 300 corpses had
been left unclaimed in his mortuary and others for several years with
some deposited as far back as 2010.
He said, “Some of the dead bodies are
from Akwa Ibom and neighbouring states. Others are from Cameroon and
Cross River State which were deposited by people who said they were
their relatives but they failed to collect them after many years. We
tried to trace the addresses they gave us but discovered that those
addresses were fake and the phone numbers they gave too were fake.”
Unlike the cases of UCTH and the General
Hospital in Calabar, Ben-Chima said he was afraid of burying the bodies
in a mass grave because the owners of the corpses might appear some day
to demand for the bodies of their relatives.
In Ekiti State for instance, the
situation has become so bad that the state government announced over the
radio one week ago that families who had unclaimed corpses in the
government hospitals in the state should come for them immediately as
the situation had become worse.
Raising the alarm over the situation in
the mortuary of the Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital, Ado Ekiti,
the Chief Medical Director, Dr. Kolawole Ogundipe, said that unclaimed
corpses in the mortuary had become a threat to the smooth running of the
facility.
Ogundipe said such unclaimed bodies had occupied the available space in the mortuary and was impeding service delivery.
In a similar case, a spokesperson for
the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu, Mr. Cyril Keleze,
said the situation in the facility’s mortuary had become so bad that
morticians who maintain the bodies were now finding it difficult to
manage because of the congestion.
“In this kind of situation, we’ll get
the permission of the government to go ahead and bury such corpses in
order to decongest the mortuary,” Keleze said. In Oyo State, a health
worker at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, who spoke on
condition of anonymity, described the situation as a constant worry for
the management of the hospital’s mortuary.
The source said it had become common for
families who could not afford to pay mortuary and hospital bills to
simply abandon the corpses of their deceased relations.
Another source in the hospital said UCH
authorities had made announcements in the media this year, calling on
families of the deceased persons to come for the corpses.
The source said, “The law says that
operators of public mortuaries must place advertisements in a major
newspaper two or three times before classifying bodies as abandoned
corpses. After the first advertisement, you have to wait for certain
number of days before placing a reminder, after which you can go ahead
and dispose the bodies. Sometimes, a third reminder may be necessary
depending on the number of the corpses involved.
“The management of UCH placed
advertisements in the newspapers to announce that there were abandoned
corpses in the hospital mortuary. There were few responses but many
bodies still had to be disposed. There have been two batches of such
disposal this year but I cannot verify the number of corpses involved.
Without conducting such exercise, the mortuary would be crowded and
unhygienic.”
The situation is the same in Osun State
where the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology Teaching Hospital in
Osogbo had to organise a mass burial for some unclaimed corpses last
week.
In Kwara State, hospital authorities are
finding it difficult to track down many of the relations of the
deceased as the contact numbers of many of them have remained switched
off.
The Director-General, Kwara State
Hospitals Management Bureau, Dr. Olubunmi Jetawo-Winter, told one of our
correspondents on Friday that two of the state government mortuaries
were facing the problem of unclaimed corpses.
She said the hospital management bureau
had made concerted efforts to contact affected families to claim the
corpses, but have been largely unsuccessful.
According to her, the hospitals have
been incurring the costs of preserving the corpses without knowing when
the families would ever come for them.
To find a solution to this problem,
Jetawo-Winter said the hospital management had notified the Ministry of
Justice and the Kwara State Police Command to help track down the
families. But in the meantime, she said the bureau would continue to
make public announcements.
Our correspondent in Ondo State also
reported that the mortuary in the specialist hospital in the state
capital, Akure, was filled with abandoned corpses.
An attendant in the hospital, who
pleaded anonymity, said some of the corpses were identified but that the
families had simply refused to claim them.
“But we cannot dispose them unless the
government approves their disposal. When it is time for the disposal,
the government would announce its intention in the media and a deadline
would be set,” the attendant said.
However, findings showed that that this
situation does not affect hospitals in the northern part of the country
where Muslims are required to inter the bodies of deceased persons
within a day of their death.
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