Only last week, Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola signed a law that provides for voluntary cremation. While Buddhists and other practitioners of oriental religions are rejoicing, many are simply horrified. Sample one reaction: "You can't mutilate anybody. It is not acceptable; it is a major sin in Islam. Fire is a punishment that Allah gives afterlife. Nobody has the right to mete out the punishment of God."
It is no longer news that the Cremation Bill was signed into law by Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State on Monday 10 June, 2013, finally laying to rest weeks and months of hot and passionate debate on the desirability or otherwise of sending one's loved ones away via burning.
The new law, aside allowing residents to burn their dead if they so wish, also empowers medical practitioners, with government's approval, to cremate abandoned and unclaimed corpses after a reasonable period of time has been given as notice. Fashola said the law was enacted to provide more choices in a growing global state and accommodate the different beliefs of residents.
He said: "The law tells a story of the full consciousness of how global our state has become.
"People migrate here, build homes here, set up businesses here. And if some people think cremation is the best way to do what they want to do, I think we should also as a global city; provide that choice as it is done in all other global cities of the world."
What began as a private member Bill initiated by the Chairman of the Lagos State House of Assembly Committee on Health Services, Suuru Avoseh (Badagry Constituency 2) has finally become law.
Titled as "A Bill for a Law to Provide for Voluntary Cremation of Corpses and Unclaimed Corpses within Lagos State," Avoseh had argued that it became inevitable because of the challenges public mortuaries across the state had been grappling with as a result of overstretched facilities.
According to him, hundreds of decomposing and unclaimed bodies had piled up in many such mortuaries state-wide, a situation he said demanded an urgent measure to avert possible epidemic occasioned by the stench from the corpses.
"The law would also solve the problem associated with getting land for mass burial; (and) decongest the mortuaries battling with cases of unidentified and unclaimed corpses.... It is a humane way to take care of unclaimed corpses, though it is strange and new in Nigeria'', the lawmaker had said.
In simple terms, cremation is a way of disposing the remains of the dead through burning, instead of burial. The arguments against it then and even now are on all lines: cultural, religious, social and even economic. They continue to rage even with the signing of the law.
National Mirror