Home

Families camp outside mortuary demanding bodies

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Some KwaZulu-Natal families have resorted to camping outside the Fort Napier Mortuary in Pietermaritzburg, demanding the release of the bodies of their loved ones.

Mortuary workers across the province are on a go-slow, resulting in families not being able to bury their loved ones, due to a backlog in post-mortems.

The families say this has prolonged the grieving process and that they need to find closure.

“Two weeks is a long time that we keep postponing. My mom has been sitting in candles all this time and mourners come and go and we have to buy them food because it’s how we do things. We are asking that they help us so we can proceed with the burial,” says one of the family members.

Meanwhile, National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu)’s provincial secretary Phakamani Ndunakazi says there are problems at all forensic facilities in the province.

Ndunakazi says they want to resolve this, but there are still outstanding issues that must be dealt with.

“Now the challenge we’re having is we’ve observed that other mortuaries across the province have embarked again on this work to rule. One of those issues is the payment of their backpays which is amounting to R60 million of which the department of health has proposed seven months ago.”

“The second issue is the conditions of service, they don’t get protective clothing, the freezers where you keep corpse are not working. We’ve met [or did] what you call investigation in loco-  we’ve seen that the conditions are unbearable,” explains Ndunakazi.

Author

MOST READ