Durban — Mortuaries in KwaZulu-Natal are suffering the repercussions of the ongoing Nehawu strike and as a result, clients are being forced to delay funeral preparations.
National Funeral Practitioners Association of SA (Nafupa) secretary-general, Mlungisi Gumede, said the strike had caused a lot of backlogs when it came to fetching corpses from hospitals and clients had been constantly complaining.
“What is happening is sad, especially for the families who are not able to bury their family members at the moment because of this strike.
“As funeral parlours, we are unable to continue with work as usual because we are not allowed to enter hospital premises. Hence it is not easy for us to do our job properly and we are very worried about our clients’ well being.”
Gumede said this setback had caused clients a lot of panic, and as a result, funeral parlours were losing money.
“Clients have been coming to our offices with grievances that they cannot continue with funeral preparations because they are still waiting for the bodies of the dead.
“We are terrified of going near the hospitals because we fear that protesters might harm the hearses, or even worse, the drivers,” said Gumede.
He said the strike had made it a struggle for clients to lodge funeral claims.
“It is disheartening that people are dying every day and this is happening, to an extent that it is hard for clients to lodge funeral claims as people need money to bury the dead.”
Gumede said, as an association, they were pleading with the government or the Department of Health to try to mitigate the situation because there was no alternative way around this.
Owner of Khayelihle Funerals, Muzi Mkhize, said the backlog was a pain for clients because post-mortems could not be processed at the moment and life had come to standstill.
“The problem we are going to have when all this blows over, is that we are going to face an overload of work since we cannot even operate on bodies at the moment,” said Mkhize.
Owner of Thula funeral services in Pietermaritzburg, Thula Mhlophe, said last week a client came crying because they had been waiting for bodies to be released from Howick Mortuary, instead they were told that they would not get the body because the post-mortem had not been processed.
Meanwhile, the SANDF said it had deployed military healthcare practitioners from the SA Military Health Services following a request for assistance by the Department of Health due to the strike.
The KZN Department of Health was approached for comment but had not responded by publication time.
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