Ghana’s Mortuaries and Funeral Facilities Agency (MOFFA) plans to deploy personnel to all districts to monitor funeral activities and help prevent the mistreatment of corpses.

The agency says the personnel will be equipped with mobile phones and motorbikes to enable them to respond quickly to funeral activities and document cases of suspected abuse.

Executive Director for the agency, Francis Ennin speaking to JoyNews’ Stephen Mensah indicated that the deployment forms part of measures to strengthen oversight of the funeral industry and deter people from handling corpses in ways that violate their dignity.

“We’ll be giving them mobile phones and motorbikes so that wherever there is a funeral activity, they may be going there.

They may be taking pictures and videos so that whoever misbehaves, the person may not know the presence of MOFA personnel there. They will be deployed into all the districts in Ghana.

We have started with regional offices. So when these people are employed, they’ll be going into the districts,” he said.

He added that the presence of the personnel at funeral grounds could itself serve as a deterrent. The planned district-level deployment follows the establishment of regional offices by the agency.

“If you go to some parts of this country, if you go to northern part of this country, people will not behave in such a manner. So, we are concerned about the southern part or the middle up to the southern part of Ghana, where these things are common.

And then we want to tackle those from those areas. It will even put some fear in them so that we can keep distance,” he said.

Mr Ennin said MOFFA is also working on proposals to strengthen legislation governing the handling of corpses, including the introduction of punitive measures against offenders.

The agency is currently preparing a draft document to guide the proposed changes, after concerns that formally amending the existing legislation could be costly,” he noted.

“The legislation, we need to amend some portions of it so that we can fix in some punitive measures on people who handle corpses and do all sorts of things.” he said.

The draft is being considered by a committee and will have to be approved by the MOFFA board and the Ministry of Health before it can become a national working document.

The agency says its immediate focus would be on parts of southern and middle Ghana where it believes inappropriate practices involving corpses are more prevalent.

The measures are part of broader efforts by the agency to ensure that corpses are treated with dignity and that funeral facilities and activities comply with the law.