Prime
Weekend burial policy would be a death knell to Sunday worship
Rt. Rev. Dr. Fred Sheldon Mwesigwa
What you need to know:
- Since weekend comprises Saturday and Sunday, it is only logical to deduce that burials will be conducted on Saturday and Sundays.
The draft National funerals Management policy 2021 which is anchored on the argument that Ugandans waste a lot of time on burials during weekdays and proposes to reserve weekends for funerals, is a harbinger for desecration of Sunday worship.
Since weekend comprises Saturday and Sunday, it is only logical to deduce that burials will be conducted on Saturday and Sundays. While the proponents of the policy have advanced arguments that funerals on average take three days and in the process valuable time is lost in business and office hours, no attempt seems to have been put in teasing out the contextual issues and the possible solutions to the challenges, instead a possible cut and paste Kenyan solution has been suggested of burying at weekends. When we say Ugandans on average spend three days mourning the dead, how is the policy going to change the cultural perspective of my rural Christians.
When a person dies, in some villages neighbors are not expected to dig for three days. With the new policy it will mean if a person dies on Wednesday, then there will be no digging up to Monday! There is no way villagers are going to store the dead body on Wednesday and go on digging till after burial, it will be a prolonged mourning period. The majority of my Christians in rural areas do not necessarily have close relatives who are employed in public service jobs in other districts whom they would have to wait for to bury their loved ones on weekends.
For civil or public servants, my thinking is that instead of a blanket assumption that funerals result in loss of valuable time by relatives going to attend funerals, why not perhaps restrict attendance of funerals to the loss of a father, mother or child? In special cases too, other relatives can be considered on a case by case basis. Yet another possible loop-hole that could be addressed is the area of who accompanies a person from an institution or company that has lost a close relative?
Oftentimes all Institutional staff may love to attend such a burial, but it is incumbent upon institutions to prescribe how many staff represent others at a burial and this may not call for a national funeral policy. How I wish the framers of this policy could have researched other factors that are detrimental to Uganda’s economic challenges such as corruption. Could I be wrong to postulate that the loss of money through corruption may be incomparable to the loss of money through attendance of funerals?
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Could we be getting our priorities wrong? How about the poor quality work that some people offer in public service instead of selfless and conscientious service to the nation? The framers of the national weekend policy may need to know that there are very many people in public and civil service who have been transformed by the Sunday worship services and are now some of the most effective and efficient public servants. Sunday as a day of worship has been a sacred day for 86 percent of Ugandan Christians whose work ethic has been greatly influenced by Christian moral values.
If the policy is passed, I can envisage a disruption of Sunday worship and possible negative spin off effects on work ethic. Ankole Diocesan synod passed a policy in 2019 which prescribes that if a burial takes place on Sunday, it should start at 2pm and not earlier simply because if burial starts at 10am then it simply means there will be no Sunday worship for all the villagers. It is almost a cultural taboo that every able bodied person has to attend a funeral.
In short, if Sundays are gazetted for burial, I can see the death of Sunday worship as it will be a given, that every weekend will have multiple burials in different village locations. Although some Newspaper analysts argued that the biggest challenge to this funeral policy was deficiency in fully functional mortuary services, to me the biggest challenge is the disruption of cultural and religious norms of Ugandans and the death knell to Sunday worship, whose benefits far outweigh the arguments advanced in the weekend burial policy.
Rt. Rev. Dr. Fred Sheldon Mwesigwa
Bishop Ankole Diocese & Chancellor Bishop Stuart University. [email protected]
