The Carletonville graveyard is currently overgrown and unsafe.

By January 23, the only people cleaning up some of the graves were employees of one of the families whose loved ones are buried there. They indicated that they were helping with some other graves as well.
Elsewhere in the park section of the graveyard, the grass and weeds were, in places, just as high as some of the gravestones. The families of people buried in the parks section paid extra for these graves so that they would be maintained by the Merafong City Local Municipality.

At the bottom of this section, the grass and weeds are so long that family members will not be able to enter to get to the graves of their loved ones.

In the section where the municipality only maintains the sidewalks and sections between the individual graves, things look even worse.

It is, however, not only the normal residents’ graves that are in a bad state.

The gate to the memorial gravesite of the union struggle hero Elijah Barayi is also open, and the closing mechanism has been stolen. All valuables have been stripped from the site, while grass and weeds are growing out of the paving.

Although there is security at the front entrance to the graveyard, the municipality has not fixed the fencing that has been broken in several places at the back. This makes it easy for criminals to get into the facility if they walk towards it through the veld.

Meanwhile, the work to fix the road to the graveyard is proceeding well.

According to an employee of the contractor, they will, however, not finish the whole road. They will have to stop in about a month, as the work is set out to continue in stages.

Although the Herald contacted the municipality about the problems, they did not reply by printing time.