The Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu, says it has given families who abandoned its dead ones in its teaching hospital’s mortuary 21 days to evacuate them.
Addressing newsmen on Sunday in Enugu, the Vice Chancellor of the university, Prof. Christian Anieke, said the evacuation became necessary to enable the university renovate the mortuary befitting of a teaching hospital.
According to reports, GOUNI is owned by the Catholic Diocese of Enugu and had recently converted and upgraded one of its hospital Ntasiobi Ndino Na’ Afufu as teaching hospital to the university.
Anieke said failure of the families to remove the corpses after the expiration of 21 days which began on Nov. 13 , the school would organised mass burial for them.
“We have gotten court injunction to carry out mass burial of the 33 abandoned corpses in our teaching hospital morgue.
“Some of them has stayed there for over 18 years and it is quite challenging as we want to renovate and make the hospital a befitting teaching hospital,” he said.
The clergyman who said, though, he did not know what was responsible for the abandonment, stressed that the reason could be no relations or they were criminals.
“Therefore, I am appealing to the members of the public if they have anybody there to come and remove them by giving the person a befitting burial.
“We are talking about human beings here and not animals. Go and check if your relationship is there,” he advised.
He added that in Igbo tradition families have to bury their dead ones well and it was believed that, “If the dead person is not given befitting burial it will have bad consequences on the family.
“So you have to come to Ntasiobi as that is the tradition and spiritual too,” he explained.
When contacted, the Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Prof. Cajetan Nwadinigwe, said many of the corpses do not have names, adding that about 14 of them bear one name.
He said there were no date as to when they were brought to the morgue, adding some of them had been there for over 10 years.
“This were our basis of approaching court and advertising the notice on newspapers for families to see,” he said.
