Funeral parlours ‘overburdened with corpses’

Funerals parlours in the Eastern Cape are struggling to cope with the influx of corpses as Covid19 sweeps through the province.

Desperate parlour owners are appealing to premier Oscar Mabuyane to devise a strategy to alleviate the backlog.

As quickly as they bury people so more corpses arrive, they say.

The parlour owners attribute the backlog to delays in death certificates being signed off, without which bodies cannot be released to families for burial or cremation.

The lockdown closure of home affairs offices has not helped, they argue, although the department vehemently denies this.

South African Funeral Parlour Association (Safpa) secretary Khanya Maxathana told the Dispatch owners had written to Mabuyane and the department of home affairs asking them to come up with a plan whereby corpses could be buried within three days, rather than the current five-day waiting period.

“The date of the funeral is determined by the day the death certificate is issued. We wrote to home affairs and asked that there be a specific queue that deals with death certificates so that the process can be fast-tracked, but we never got a reply. The death rate is very high.

“We are not allowed to bury a person without a death certificate, because we are wary of insurance fraud. All over the Eastern Cape, bodies are piling up.”

The delays, according to Maxathana, could even last weeks.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases recommends that the dead should be cremated, but failing that, burials should follow strict procedures.

Authorities say only when the death toll is “very high” should corpses be buried within three days.

Speaking to SABC radio on Wednesday, Mabuyane said mortuary owners had complained that morgues were full of corpses.

Mabuyane’s spokesperson, Mvusiwekhaya Sicwetsha, told the Dispatch that Mabuyane would talk with funeral parlour sector.

“Remember that besides Covid-19, there are daily deaths in our country. Both Covid-19 deaths and deaths not related to Covid-19 require mortuaries.”

Asked whether Mabuyane would forward the parlours’ complaints to the Covid-19 national command council, Sicwetsha said: “Government is encouraging the sector to work with families ... At this stage we will not take this to the national command council.”

Gcinile Mabulu, the provincial spokesperson for the department of home affairs, denied that it took a long time for death certificates to be issued.

“Once a client presents oneself with proper documentation at the office counter, falling into a specially designated queue for death registration, a death certificate is readily issued to the client,” he said.

“Death registration ... takes place over the counter. One does not post documents through to home affairs and ... [await] a response.

“There is no time delay, as inferred, except at falling in a queue, awaiting one’s turn. Once at the counter, the process flows and the client leaves the office at once with a certificate.”

Bongani Mahlakahlaka, manager of Amagasela Funeral Directors in King William’s Town, said: “We are pushing that we stick to the 72 hours when we receive the body until it is buried, but with delays from hospitals and home affairs this does not happen. It takes longer.”