Ugandan politician wants to forbid funerals during the week: Burials waste too many working hours
(Speciosa Kazibwe)
It’s been a while since I heard anything quite as casually and appallingly cynical as the following political scheme, thought up by the head of an Ugandan state agency:
A Ugandan official has suggested to MPs that funerals should be limited to Saturday afternoons to stop people taking time off work to attend them. Speciosa Kazibwe, a former vice-president who now heads a state development agency, noted that Uganda’s death rate was very high. Uganda has been hard hit buy HIV/Aids, which caused 91,000 deaths in 2005.
I wish I were joking but Ms. Kazibwe complained that burials, besides taking up lots of time, also demanded the use of vehicles which could have been put to much more productive uses.
So, she has now suggested that “each constituency should have a mortuary with a fridge that could preserve corpses.”
It’s not all that long ago that Uganda’s old and unlamented president Idi Amin also used fridges to store dead Ugandans – so that they wouldn’t go off before the old dictator was ready to eat them.
This, let’s say, recycled idea of using refrigerators to store Uganda’s dead for future handling is, of course, not quite as distasteful as Idi Amin’s use of his fridges – but not by all that much.
(Idi Amin)
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
