The Bulawayo City Council has identified a new cemetery site with the capacity to accommodate 80 000 graves at Goodhope Farm.

This comes as the country’s second largest city grapples with rapidly dwindling burial space.

In 2015, deputy Mayor of the city, Clr Mlandu Ncube lamented on the shortage of burial space saying Lady Stanly Cemetery was left with a limited number of graves to bury outstanding individuals of the Bulawayo community and wanted to know if the city had identified new sites for this important space of land.

According to Council Marvel and Pumula cemeteries’ in the city were gazetted but the city had identified challenges that have seen no burials taking place there.

“Pumula South and Marvel Cemeteries had been gazetted. Burials in these two cemeteries had not yet been conducted.

Marvel Cemetery was waiting infrastructure completion. Pumula South trials were done and the place was found to be very rocky,” read the latest council minutes.