Johannesburg - The Commission for Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities said on Tuesday it would approach the courts to seek relief for communities aggrieved by the re-use of the graves of their loved ones without their consent.
“We need to go to court over this issue. The damage caused in terms of culture and spirituality is irreparable,” commission chairwoman Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva told journalists in Johannesburg.
The commission presented a report on the re-use of graves by local government authorities following continued complaints received across municipalities on the removal of graves of their loved ones without their consent. The practice was especially rife at the Ethekhwini metro in Durban.
Mkhwanazi-Xaluva said the commission would take the fight for the dignity of poor people to court. She added that the commission had been talking to authorities about the re-use of graves since 2011.
“We have been engaging and begging since 2011. The law allows us to take a recourse if all has failed…our constituents will judge us as to whether we are a toothless institution,” Mkhwanazi-Xaluva said.
“Once people lose trust in Chapter 9 institutions, they lose faith in the constitution. At some point, one needs to allow the law to take its course.”
The complaints being received, mostly from Ethekhwini metro, were that people found others buried in the grave of their loved one without their knowledge, or found a grave half dug up in preparation for someone else’s burial.
Government needed to respect people’s cultural rights and consult instead of enforcing unfair by-laws, she said.
“Twenty years later in a democratic South Africa, led by the African National Congress, we have this situation where rights are violated by the ANC, meaning those in power are disregarding the rights of poor people.”
Earlier, Mkhwanazi said the Ethekwini municipality also had a policy in place through which residents would pay rental for grave space after 10 years of burial. If the family did not put up a tombstone within 10 years of burial of their loved one, the grave would be allocated to someone else.
Ethekhwini needed to be stopped before other municipalities started following suit and charging communities for burial space, she said.
The commission would also investigate reports that graves were mowed down to make way for the construction of Eskom’s Medupi power station in Limpopo, Mkhwanazi-Xaluva said.
“Maybe it is for these reason that the power station cannot just seem to be completed, because of people’s remains there. People’s rights were trampled upon, we hear of remaining graves there around Medupi are fenced off and people cannot access them.”
Eskom and government would have to answer once an investigation on destroyed graves at Medupi was completed, she said.
African Spirituality and Culture professor at the University of Pretoria, Tinyiko Maluleke, said the main problem regarding graves was land, followed by commercial interests.
“We must remember that the business of burials is huge in South Africa. Huge profits are made out of this, and there is no reason not to believe that municipalities could be implicated in this business, although there is no proof,” he said.
He said the practise by local authories infringed on the dignity of the living who preserved the connection with their dead loved ones, and not on the dead themselves as people might think.
Xaluva-Mkhwanazi said the commission had met with Ethekhwini municipality officials, the SA Local Government Association, the House of Traditional Leaders and the portfolio committee on traditional affairs in Parliament and raised their concerns regarding the re-using of graves.
ANA