Funeral homes making a killing

Funeral homes are the only winners in South Africa's struggle against one of the most severe HIV/AIDS pandemics in the world.

Pierre Gouws, marketing manager of Martin's Funeral Parlour in Johannesburg, the biggest, richest city in the country, told PlusNews that although death sometimes relieved a family of health-related expenses, it usually resulted in exorbitant new costs for those who were unprepared.

"This is why the importance of secure burial policies with a reputable parlour needs to be emphasised.

In most cases people are caught unawares and often end up with an unnecessarily huge funeral which they can barely afford," he said.

In a 2002 survey of 771 AIDS-affected households in various parts of South Africa, the US-based Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that 55 percent of respondents who had paid for a funeral in the preceding year spent four times the mean average monthly household income of R5,153 (about US$682), with one family spending just over US$5,000.

PUTTING A PRICE ON DEATH

Some burials were deliberately more extravagant, depending on the special requests of the family, or the deceased in their last will and testament, but Gouws said a very basic funeral should not cost more than $1,200.

"This is how it should be, but it isn't always so.

There are those funeral homes, both legal and illegal, who see other people's grief as a means of getting rich quick. To a large extent, the AIDS crisis has resulted in a lot of undesirable companies sprouting up almost overnight, with some parlours resorting to unspeakable tactics," he said.

UNAIDS estimated that 5.5 million of the country's 43 million population were living with HIV by the end of 2005, and almost 1,000 related deaths occurred every day.

ENOUGH TO RAISE THE DEAD

Natasha and Roxy Johnson's mother might not have been part of the stark national AIDS figures, but the sisters know only too well the underhandedness of unscrupulous funeral parlours.

"When our mom lost her long battle with cancer in November last year, we never imagined that our grief would be further compounded by a greedy funeral director who refused to release my mother's body unless we met his cash demands," Natasha told PlusNews.

For reasons still unclear, the hospital where their mother had died released her body to Lakeside Funerals, who then made burial arrangements costing $1,600, despite the sisters' wish to use another undertaker.

"It was kidnapping in a sense, because Lakeside would not release my mom's body to the parlour of choice.

They kept the body for just over a week, while we incurred the cost of a lawyer to file legal action against them. In the end, we were so desperate to lay my mother's body to rest that we agreed to fork out almost $420 as a corpse removal fee," she said.

Natasha said her main concern was that her mother's body was badly decomposed, because Lakeside did not have refrigerated facilities for the storage of corpses.

According to Gouws, it was not uncommon for the authorities to allow bodies to be removed for storage while the family was being informed, but once the family had decided on an undertaker they should pay a removal and storage fee of no more than $50.

"It is a sad state of affairs when grieving families have to endure further and unnecessary pain because of people who feel they can operate outside of the law."

A survey by the South African Council of Churches (SACC), representing 24 million people from 28 member churches, recently revealed that an estimated 850,000 people a year were buried, but only 1,500 of the 15,000 funeral homes in South Africa were registered.

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