Cape Town - The South African Funeral Practitioners Association in the Western Cape (Safpa) has appealed to the government to intervene in the current load shedding crisis, saying a number of funeral parlours are battling to operate.
This comes as Eskom announced that its recovery plan was only expected to bear fruit in about two years.
Safpa spokesperson Thabo Mlumbi said they appealed to the government to start introducing regulations to deal with essential services in respect of load shedding, as they did during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The President has cancelled his foreign obligation as an indication of seriousness that must be attached to this matter. Funeral directors would not want to follow suit by cancelling removing of the deceased bodies so as to show the seriousness and challenges posed by the load shedding to the business.
As parlours we need an urgent intervention of this matter, failure to that we will be left with no choice but to cancel the services. It will serve no purpose for parlours to remove deceased from home or anywhere else so as to be in a bad state in the mortuary.
Mortuaries rely on electricity and fuel. Without the two we cannot operate,” he said.
Mguda Funeral Services owner Makhaya Mguda told the Cape Times it has become extremely expensive to run a mortuary now.
“I have a 3 phase generator and diesel on a daily basis costs me over R750 as compared to my usual spending.
“My business is situated in Airport Industrial and we always travel to Bellville now for death certificate registration, which is far as compared to Nyanga Home Affairs, which gets affected by load shedding.
It is extremely expensive to run a mortuary now under this load shedding and it will be unfair to defer these costs to the bereaved families,” he said.
General Manager for Corporate Affairs at Avbob, Adriaan Bester said the government needs to find immediate solutions to deal with the problem. “Load shedding does create severe hardship in the sense that the nature of our business demands that we keep our cold room facilities running.
“Our cold rooms run at about 4 degrees.
“The fact that we are forced to run generators for a long period of time means that there is substantial costs to the funeral parlour. I support the notion that government has to find some way to help essential services to survive this energy crisis,” Bester said.
National Funeral Practitioners Association of South Africa spokesperson Dududu Magano said they were experiencing many challenges administratively where they were battling to process death certificates in certain areas that are hit by load shedding.
“We are also battling with processing claims from our clients. However we are saying that despite these challenges, we do not support the request for families to bury their loved ones within four days. We believe that we should be rather looking at solutions to the challenges we are all facing and we should engage government on these challenges, and government should support us in this regard.”
Cape Times