Nakuru County has issued a 21-day public notice for the disposal of 59 unclaimed bodies that have remained in two major public morgues for over three months.
The notice, signed by County Public Health Officers Beatrice Oyiengo and Rachael Mwangi, affects 37 bodies at the Public Mortuary at Nakuru Annex Provincial General Hospital (PGH) and 22 bodies at the Nakuru Teaching and Referral Hospital Mortuary.
The deceased include 15 adults and 22 infants at the Annex facility, and 22 adults at the referral hospital.
“The bodies have overstayed in the facilities, hampering effective service delivery. Interested members of the public are urged to identify and collect the bodies within 21 days, after which the county government will seek authority for disposal,” the notice reads.
The county has published a detailed list of the unclaimed bodies, including names (where available), places and dates of death, and reported causes. Some of the deceased remain unidentified, with police recovering their bodies without any documentation.
Causes of death listed in the report include road accidents, drowning, mob injustice, shootings, abortion, murder, and sudden or natural deaths.
According to Oyiengo, the county has exhausted all efforts to trace the next of kin without success.
Continued storage of the unclaimed bodies, she noted, is straining the mortuaries’ capacity and affecting public health service delivery.
“If the bodies are not claimed within the stated period, they will be disposed of at the Nakuru South Cemetery in accordance with the Public Health Act Cap 242 and the Public Health (Public Mortuaries) Rules of 1991,” she said.
The law requires that a body not be kept in a public morgue for more than 10 days.
In the event that a body remains unclaimed for 21 days, the hospital is mandated to seek a court order and issue a 14-day public notice before disposal.
Every year, between 200 and 300 unclaimed bodies are reported in Nakuru County.
Reasons for failure to claim bodies vary and include lack of awareness, inability to afford burial costs, land scarcity and cultural barriers.
Once the notice period lapses, unclaimed bodies are buried in public cemeteries, often in mass graves and without customary rites.
The disposal process aims to decongest morgues and comply with public health requirements.
While most bodies are eventually buried, a few may be preserved for medical training purposes.
The Anatomy Act Cap 249 permits authorised medical institutions to obtain unclaimed bodies for scientific study, with approval from the Ministry of Health.
Counselling psychologist Ochieng Okuku attributes the high number of unclaimed bodies to a lack of information. “In many cases, families are unaware their loved ones have died.
Unnatural deaths, especially, make identification difficult, particularly where police cannot retrieve usable fingerprints,” he noted.
Under the current law, postmortems are conducted by coroners, qualified officers tasked with investigating unnatural or suspicious deaths.
However, implementation of the National Coroners’ Service Act, enacted in 2017, has stalled due to legal ambiguities around which Cabinet Secretary should appoint the coroner-general and operationalise the service.
The Act was intended to transfer the responsibility for investigating deaths in police custody, prisons, and those resulting from violence or negligence from the police to an independent coroner-general appointed by the Justice Ministry.
Until the legal bottlenecks are addressed, public inquests under Sections 385-387 of the Criminal Procedure Code remain the primary mechanism for probing sudden or unexplained deaths in Kenya.