The Kpone Traditional Council (KTC) has decided to bury the dead on its land boundaries to protect its lands.
The council is battling the Kpone-Katamanso District Assembly (KKDA) over alleged encroachment on its cemetery land.
Hundreds of squatters have also taken over a large portion of the council’s unoccupied cemetery land.
Describing the encroachment and occupancy of the squatters on their cemetery land as worrying, a member of the council’s Land Allocation Committee, Nii Tetteh Ashong, who is also the Chief Fisherman of Kpone, told The Finder in an interview that the council would start allowing burial on the boundaries of the unoccupied land to protect it from further encroachment.
The KTC, he explained, would embark on an unannounced demolition of all illegal structures on their cemetery land “because we need to preserve our cemetery land for our dead. We have the land and so we cannot allow it to be occupied illegally and then we go elsewhere to bury our dead.”
Nii Ashong was quick to add that the KKDA did not release the cemetery land to the squatters – who, he said, where persons who had settled on the premises many years ago when they worked for the garages in Tema.
He said, “These squatters were here before KKDA was born in 2012 and these squatters have been here for more than a decade now.”
Nii Tetteh Ashong told The Finder that series of notices sent to the squatters to vacate the area had fallen on deaf ears “and since the language they would understand is demolition, we will start burying the dead around them and the next move will be to demolish any structure that sits on our traditional cemetery land.”
Some of the squatters The Finder spoke to claimed they are natives of Kpone, hence they saw nothing wrong getting a place to put up a structure to provide accommodation for them and their families.
Nii Ashong, however, said when KTC moves bulldozers to the land, the real owners of the said land would be known, adding that KTC would not listen to any sympathetic and human face expressions from anybody.
Those words, he said, should start going to the squatters to relocate before it is too late.