Funeral industry buckles under load shedding. Picture - iStock.
The National Funeral Practitioner Association of South Africa (Nafupa SA) has sounded the alarm over troubles in the funeral industry due to persistent load shedding.
The association‘s spokesperson Dududu Maganu said the rolling blackouts mainly affect smaller funeral businesses battling to make ends meet.
“Most people, when you talk about load shedding, only think about storage or mortuaries, as in storing the bodies,” explained Maganu.
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“But that’s still manageable because every undertaker with a mortuary has a backup system or a generator. But even that is becoming unmanageable because the cost is constantly rising.”
Maganu said the short-notice load shedding announcements from Eskom and the unpredictable timeline for each bout of power cuts had impacted business owners’ ability to prepare their backups adequately.
Smaller-run mortuaries have to fork out extra cash at a moment’s notice for petrol and diesel to run generators for prolonged periods.
These unplanned expenses affect companies’ cash flow, and Maganu says these costs cannot be passed on to grieving families.
“You cannot now say to the client that you are charging for diesel and petrol,” he explained.
Other areas of business, particularly communications and administration, are also halted when the lights go off.
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Clients battle to get hold of service providers leading to bodies not being collected timeously, or worse, bodies in transit are delayed for hours in load shedding traffic.
Claims are also delayed, particularly during the four-hour stints without power, because they cannot be sent to the underwriter within business hours.
“The backlog that it takes to get claims from the underwriter, the backlog they have on their side to process these claims. So the 24 hours given to the client are no longer 24 hours,” Maganu said
While industry figureheads gather around the drawing board to develop solutions, the costs for smaller parlours are running high.
“Overheads are now exceeding their income.”
The reality is that funeral businesses that can no longer absorb the additional costs have shut their doors.
“Load shedding is no longer a challenge; it’s a norm, and no one is coming up with a solution. Eskom cannot help us, and the government doesn’t have a solution. The government has not looked at how they can assist undertakers.
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Compiled by Narissa Subramoney
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