APA-Pretoria (South Africa) The South African government has run out of land to bury thousands of unclaimed bodies at state hospitals nationwide, Deputy Health Minister Sibongiseni Dhlomo has disclosed.
Dhlomo admitted this on Monday following disclosures that state mortuaries were keeping over 4,000 unclaimed bodies in the country – with the majority of these corpses located in KwaZulu-Natal morgues.
The deputy minister said the government currently did not have burial spaces unless “we speak to municipalities.”
Due to this, he had a meeting earlier this month with Deputy Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister, Parks Tau to explore the possibility of identifying municipality land for government to use as burial grounds countrywide, Dhlomo said.
Dhlomo said although the policy is that a body should not be kept in a mortuary for more than 30 days, some corpses have been unclaimed since 2017.
“The policy says keep the body in our refrigeration for these number of days. Beyond this, we must find another alternative which we now know it’s an underground storage (burials),” he said.
Mortuary staff have raised concern over the violation of health regulations, overcrowding of unidentified bodies and health hazards the bodies posed to them and others, he noted.
NM/jn/APA