Grave

By A Correspondent- In a shocking development, thieves are stealing tombstones from a graveyard at Unit L cemetery in Chitungwiza.

Relatives who spoke to ZimEye said the thieves ransacked the graveyard and they were shocked to see that tombstones had been removed from their deceased relatives’ graves when they had visited intending to cut the grass around the grave and place flowers.

“We visit once every month to cut the tall grass around this area and put flowers. The challenge is that around this area very few people visit their relatives buried here so we end up cutting grass at the graveyard to clear the way for us to access our mother’s grave.”

Some of the graves are now in a sorry state and you can hardly see if anyone is buried there. Like this area where the tombstone was stolen, the deceased here were buried in 1998 March so you can imagine the time that has lapsed.”

Said a council official manning the graveyard who only identified himself as sekuru meaning uncle:

“This is not new. The thieves come here and when they fail to remove the tombstones they break them.

We have picked several of the labelled tombstones after the thieves dropped them and we suspect that they might have dropped them because they thought they were about to be caught.

There is not much that we can do because this normally happens around this time of the year when there is tall grass. We are too few to maintain the graveyard which is very big.”

He said the other challenge that they faced was that politically affiliated people were building their houses inside the graveyard where some had even dug wells that they used to draw drinking water.

Said another resident Paul Bhende:

“We have new housing developments and i do not think that council is even aware of them. They have encroched into the graveyard. We just see politically affiliated land barons parcelling out land and this is really sad. How do you even build a structure inside a graveyard? Its shocking.

This has paved way for the thieves to come in and out because it becomes difficult for the council security guys to track what is going on. Chitungwiza municipality must take charge before we have people digging up the dead.”

We publish below pictures of the new housing developments that have encroched into the graveyard.

Efforts to get a comment from the local authority was work in progress by the time of writing….

More details follow…..