KPONE REJECTS DEAD BODIES (1B, DEC 13, 2010)

bereaved families who sent the bodies of their relatives for burial at the Kpone Public Cemetery were disappointed when they were prevented from doing so by the youth of the town.
Some of the families had to look for alternative burial grounds around Tema, while about nine of the bodies were sent back to the morgue.
Personnel from the Police Buffalo Unit of the Tema Regional Police who had been detailed to the Kpone Cemetery to enforce the law could not help the mourners, as the Kpone youth, numbering more than 400, refused to yield.
Wearing red armbands and headgear and armed with rods and machetes, the youth sang war songs to deter the mourners.
They refilled the graves with sand, barricaded the entrance to the cemetery and burnt tyres there to prevent vehicles from driving in.
Mourners had to redirect their vehicles to avoid any confrontation with the demonstrators and that created heavy traffic on the Tema-Aflao road.
The protest followed a resolution passed and read at a press conference held last week by the coalition of youth groups in Kpone to resist the continued use of their land “as a dumping ground by the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA)” and the indiscriminate sale of their lands by the Tema Development Corporation (TDC).
At the press conference, the coalition indicated that it would resist all attempts by the TDC to forcibly acquire Kpone land and use it against the people’s wish.
According to the spokesman for the coalition, Mr William Josiah, the people of Kpone were fed up with the use of the area “as a waste basket for the people of Tema” and would use demonstrations to say “enough is enough”.
He said the action would be extended to other sites which had illegally been acquired as sanitation concerns and landfill sites.
Mr Josiah said the people of Kpone now needed land to support their growing population and called on the TDC to release all lands belonging to the Kpone Stool.
He said Kpone became landless after the 1952 compulsory acquisition of its land by the then government which ceded 17,000 acres of the land, representing almost 90 per cent of Kpone lands, to the TDC.
He said all appeals to the TDC to release the unused lands to the people had proved futile, noting that the demonstration was an extension of that demand.
He said in spite of the sacrifice, no good thing had been extended to Kpone to benefit the people, only “bad things like public refuse dumps and cemeteries”.
“We are not fools, but even if we were, we are now wide awake,” Mr Josiah said.
The Chief Environmental Health Officer of the TMA, Mr Peter Amuzu, reacting to the action by the Kpone youth, said as a temporary measure, the Environmental Health Department of the TMA had decided to provide space for some of the bereaved families at the Community 9 Cemetery which had been closed to enable them to bury their corpses later.
He said he had led a delegation to the Kpone Traditional Council (KTC) to discuss plans to use an area originally demarcated for a cemetery but now cultivated by farmers from Kpone but that had been also met with stiff resistance from the farmers.
Mr Amuzu said the Kpone Cemetery covered an area of 240 square feet, with 7,200 bodies already buried there.