Death Do Us Part

Armed and organised syndicates are muscling in on Durban’s funeral industry to exclude white and Indian-owned businesses from operating in KZN townships and rural areas. Jonathan Erasmus reports

- Jonathan Erasmus

While a call to “BAN” whIte and Indian undertakers from operating in town-ships and rural areas around Durban was always dead in the water, it points to a worrying Mafioso trend developing in the East Coast city.

Increasingly, loosely formed organised-crime syndicates acting under the guise of “business forums”, “associations” or “federations” are disrupting industries, sometimes at gunpoint, and demanding their slice of the pie. These radical groups appear to have the ear of both the eThekwini municipality and the KZN government.

In January the National Funeral Practitioners Association of South Africa (Nafupa) announced the ban, as of 1 February, warning that if any Indian or white undertakers continued to host funerals, or drive, or bury, corpses in the townships, they would be met with violence.

Speaking on SABC Morning Live in January, the association’s secretary general Nkosentsha Shezi alleged that there was a conspiracy against black funeral practitioners, preventing them from getting work from the Road Accident Fund which was a regular supplier of dead people for burial.

“Big white business and Indian companies have colluded with our own government to stop us from doing work,” he claimed. “The only way Indian or white-owned businesses should be allowed to work in townships is if they moved there and sent their children to the “overcrowded schools with broken windows”.