Lawmakers to review burial fees

The Chamber of Deputies’ standing Committee on Social Affairs will soon present a report to the House to resolve the question of high cost of accessing burial grounds among other related issues.The committee’s report is expected to help Parliament decide on new cemetery charges and land issues as well as feed into the debate on the 2001 law on cemeteries that is being reviewed by Parliament.Members of the committee were on Wednesday compiling their report following their visits to three cemeteries in Kigali including Rusororo, Nyamirambo, and Busanza.The chairperson of the committee, MP Esperance Mwiza, told The New Times that their main objective was to look into the public’s complaints over high cemetery charges.“Looking at the situation, you really find that it [burial] is costly, considering the standard of living of Rwandans.”Mwiza whose committee is, among others, responsible for issues related to welfare, demographics, hygiene and health of the population, said her team observed that the materials used in preparation of graves, for instance, headstones, are generally expensive. She further cited land scarcity and the country’s dense population as another key limiting factor. After deliberations on May 28, the committee agreed that the high burial costs at the newly opened cemetery at Rusororo cemetery in Gasabo district were uncalled for thereby launching an investigation into the matter.The matter came up when State Minister for Social Affairs, Alvera Mukabaramba, appeared before the committee to explain pertinent petitions from the public over high burial costs at the Rusororo cemetery.Graves at the cemetery are divided into categories based on financial ability. These are the premium category whose charges start from Rwf750, 000, as well as the middle and lower categories that go for Rwf450, 000 and Rwf15, 000, respectively.For special categories, Muslims are charged Rwf50, 000 while that of children is Rwf550,000 in the premium category.The cemetery was launched late last year after the closure of the Remera Cemetery then commonly known as Iwabo wa twese which had been declared full by the Mayor of Gasabo District, Willy Ndizeye.Meanwhile, in a meeting with the committee on March 22 this year, officials from the Ministry of Local Government and Social Affairs called for a review of the 2001 law on cemeteries. Despite cremation being provided for in the law, no Rwandan is known to have been cremated yet it is perceived as one of the ways to address the issue of land scarcity for cemeteries. However, MPs observed that this method was sensitive largely because it is not practised in the Rwandan culture. During the deliberations, it was noted that the country has a total of 342 public cemeteries. Research indicates that public cemeteries could be a silent environmental disaster, and a World Health Organisation (WHO) report, compiled by Ahmet S. Üçisik and Philip Rushbrook, says that decomposing bodies may cause groundwater pollution by increasing the concentration of naturally occurring organic and inorganic substances to a level sufficient to render ground waters unusable.Researchers say that viruses are fixed to soil particles more easily than bacteria and they are not carried into ground waters in large numbers. Cremation, which is common among the Jewish and Asian cultures, is said to be environmentally friendly.

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Lawmakers to review burial fees