Families in the Yilo and Manya Krobo municipalities say operators of mortuaries are asking them to come for the remains of their loved ones.
The concern is that the bodies are decomposing in the wake of the community-wide power cut.
In an interview with JoyNews on Monday, one of the youth activists in the area, Edmund Aboagye said about five families have received incessant calls from mortuary attendants to retrieve their bodies because they are rotting at the facility.
According to him, the mortuary attendants say they cannot afford to fuel the generators that keep the facility running.
“I have had about four or five persons who have their family relations of dead bodies at the mortuary call to inform me that the hospitals have called them to come and pick their dead bodies because they have started going bad at the mortuary,” he said.
Commenting on the development, the Yilo Krobo Municipal Health Director, Irina Offei, stated that she cannot confirm that families have been asked to come for their corpses yet. She added however that she is certain “if the power is not restored by Wednesday, probably, they will be asking families to do that.”
Madam Offei explained that the hospitals are now compelled to ration power because it is costing them more to keep the generators on.
Prior to this, Madam Irina Offei lamented the effect of the power outage in the Yilo Krobo and Manya Krobo municipalities.
According to her, the power situation is negatively affecting the quality of health services rendered in the municipalities.
Speaking in an interview on Joy FM’s Midday News on Tuesday, August 2, 2022, Madam Offei explained that the hospitals in the affected municipalities are compelled to rely on generators to provide health services.
Madam Offei stated that hospitals in the municipality without power spend between GH¢3,000 and GH¢5,000 to provide emergency services, theatre services, admissions, keeping blood, vaccination, and keeping refrigerators running.
She lamented that as a result of the high cost involved to get power for laboratory equipment “sometimes we have to refer to other health facilities that are nearby and have light.”
Background
Communities in the Yilo Krobo and Manya Krobo municipalities from Somanya to Kpong, have been cut off from the national grid.
The areas have been plunged into darkness since Wednesday, July 27, because Electricity Company Ghana (ECG) switched off feeders supplying power to communities in the two Municipalities over illegal connections.
According to ECG, some recalcitrant residents have tampered with their transformers and reconnected power to their homes after they were disconnected for refusal to accept prepaid meters.