I’ve read many reflections on the matter of Honourable Kabiru Mai Palace’s decision to renovate cemeteries as part of his constituency projects, some thoughtful, others less so. Still, few have truly grappled with the deeper contradictions at play. We are, after all, citizens of a country that spares no expense on the dead. Citizens who spend an arm and a leg on burials, even as the living struggle to find a roof, a bed, or a dignified space to breathe. The irony is staggering. On this, I find myself in quiet agreement, moved by the gesture of a lone parliamentarian in Zamfara, while being drawn to that idea Michel Foucault teased out in his 1967 lecture, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”. Read the second principle in that lecture carefully. Foucault argues that heterotopias, the “other spaces” of modern society, exist not in the imaginary but in the real world. They are spaces set apart, sacred and profane, and layered with meanings. They are, above all, mirrors of society. And, perhaps, no space captures this paradox more powerfully than the cemetery. For Foucault, the cemetery is not merely a resting place for the dead. It is a space in which the living make sense of death, time, order, and legacy. It is where society negotiates the dignity of the dead and the anxiety of those left behind. It is a structure of civilisation. To civilise is to organise death.

So, bless Hon. Kabiru Mai Palace, the federal lawmaker who chose to renovate 80 cemeteries in Zamfara State as part of his constituency projects. In a political culture that often views development through the lens of ribbon-cuttings, boreholes, flyovers, and roads which lead to nowhere, Mai Palace’s decision is both radical and reflective. There is wisdom in doing the things many would rather not do. There is even greater wisdom in recognising that how a society treats its dead says everything about how it thinks of the living. There is an aspect that lends his choice of projects to a quiet poignancy: we do not celebrate death. But we do honour the human necessity of memory. The cemetery, in its silence, tells the story of who we are, where we have come from, and the value we place on continuity. These are not just tombs. They are texts. The dead speak, if only we would listen.

I know this personally. Just last year, I spoke out publicly against attempts by land grabbers to corner the cemetery in my home state of Edo, where my father and generations of my forebears are buried. What began as a slow encroachment by land grabbers who claimed to have purchased the cemetery from God-knows-who soon became an outright desecration. Bulldozers were brought in. Fence lines shifted. Greed wore the cloak of development. And in that moment, it became clear to me just how fragile memory is in the face of criminality. How easily the sacred can be violated when land has more value to the living than to the dead. 

This was how I described it then: “This sacred ground, which holds the remains of my father, grandfather, grandmother, great grandfather and mother, and my generations of forebears… represents a profound cultural and historical legacy. The desecration of this burial ground is not only an affront… but also an attack on the heritage and dignity of my entire community. This disturbing illegal sale appears to be driven by the sinister desires of buyers seeking to mine human skulls and bones for ritual purposes. Such criminal acts not only undermine the sanctity of human life and the sacredness of burial grounds but also violate fundamental rights, cultural heritage, and societal norms”. 

This was not just a fight over land. It was a fight over legacy. It was about what we are willing to protect when no one is looking. And that is what makes Hon. Mai Palace’s intervention striking. He looked where few dared to look. He acted where most would shrug. He invested in a space whose dividends are neither immediate nor electoral. No one wins elections with cemeteries. And yet, here we are, talking about him. The cemeteries he renovated may not be headline-worthy in the usual, sensational sense. But in a country where public memory is always under siege, either deliberately, by neglect, by erosion, or by the conveniences of now, his gesture is a restoration not just of tombs, but of dignity.

Again, I return to Foucault, whose second principle of heterotopias helps us here. He wrote that such spaces are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”. The cemetery is one of these paradoxical spaces: it is private and public, sacred and secular, eternal and yet tethered to the now. It contains the particular names of the dead and dates of death, which gesture towards the universal. It is where cultures express their anxieties about the body, about cleanliness, about the afterlife, about order. A point that underscores the universality of gesture lies in our fading tradition: in times past, and across many communities, it was customary for young men, organised by age grades, to be mobilised periodically to clear and maintain communal burial grounds. It was more than a chore; it was a rite of belonging, a quiet affirmation that the living owed care to the dead, and that memory was a communal responsibility. That’s why, across civilisations, the cemetery has never just been about burial. It is about layout. It is about who is buried where and with what symbols. It is about what stones mark graves, if any. 

Talking about stones and symbols, I recall what appeared as my early boyish fascination with civilisation, its architecture of memory, its reverence for the past, when I crossed the boundaries of Ngwa-land into the heart of Annang country for the first time in 1980. I was just twelve, a curious child journeying from Warri, where the cemetery was a hidden place, walled off by iron gates and the hush of fear. But here, in the ancestral Annang villages, death was not shut away; it stood proudly in stone. Monumental tombstones rose like sentinels at the thresholds of homes, the dead enthroned in sculpted repose, not buried in oblivion but remembered in presence. Even then, I sensed the fact that those tombstones were not mere graves. They were galleries of memory, testaments in stone to lives once lived. Beauty and remembrance found form in carved faces and postures, as though time itself had chosen to dwell among the living. The tombs did not speak of endings but of continuities – of the dead woven into the very fabric of daily life, watching, perhaps, over the same courtyards where their children now played. What struck me most was how the past stood unashamed before the present, how memory was given weight and shape, and placed where sunlight still reached it.

And so, when an elected public official restores 80 cemeteries, he is not just laying blocks or clearing weeds. He is restoring memory. He is preserving cultural dignity. He is helping us hold on to what time, and sometimes corruption, tries to erase. But, there’s a danger of romanticising Hon. Mai Palace’s gesture. The very idea that cemeteries require renovation tells us something unsettling: we neglect the dead. We abandon spaces that once held our mourning. We forget the spaces of grief. In this, neglect is a kind of moral decay. As the living turn inward, consumed by hustle, by politics, by survival, they lose touch with the depths of society. And when they lose the depths, they become shallow. A people without reverence for their dead are a people without anchors.

But what tells us something more, beyond neglect and erasure, is how we bulldoze cemeteries for real estate, in the guise of modernity. Convert into car parks. Or leave cemeteries uncared for. Even in death, the poor cannot find peace. And this, too, is part of our civilisational paradox: we obsess over funerals, over the performances of mourning, over caskets flown in from Italy, but do little to preserve the sanctity of where those bodies finally rest. We simply celebrate the spectacle.

What Mr Mai Palace has done is restore dignity to the memories of our dead. He makes the point, through love and care, that the dead matter. That memory matters. That the community is not only those who breathe, but also those who once did. It is tempting to view his gesture as eccentric. After all, how many lawmakers think of cemeteries when planning constituency projects? Perhaps that is precisely the point. Our imagination of governance is too narrow. It sees roads and schools as development, but overlooks the fact that the deeper work of politics is also cultural. And cultural work is always about memory, about belonging, about space. In our rush to modernity, we have razed more than trees. We have raised meanings. And it is in these ‘other spaces”, as Foucault calls them, that we might find ourselves again. 

There is, of course, more to be done. Renovation is not preservation. And preservation is not protection. Our legal frameworks must catch up. Communities must be empowered to safeguard cemeteries not just as spaces for burial but as repositories of shared history. In the end, a renovated cemetery is not just about the dead. It is about the living. About how we see ourselves. About whether we believe in continuity. About whether we recognise that civilisation is not merely what we build, what we choose to remember, but also what stories lie in the bones of the departed that we choose to tell – stories which make us human, in the present. 

So, yes, bless Honourable Mai Palace. For reminding us through 80 quiet spaces in Zamfara that memory is infrastructure. That heritage is a public good. That there is grace in doing the things most would rather avoid.

Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja