MBABANE – Picture this scenario.
A teenage girl is laid down, her body cold and still. Family members whispering prayers as funeral parlour attendants, acting on a relative’s word that she has ‘succumbed to an illness’, take away her body for the journey to the mortuary.
No doctor called. No police report was made. Just word of mouth from a family member – ‘She is dead’.
In another home, several kilometres away, a five-year-old boy is reported to have ‘fallen from a guava tree’. His family, too, just like that of the teenage girl, has bypassed the authorities and sent him directly into the cold silence of the mortuary.
These are not hypothetical stories, but real situations of what once happened in the kingdom. In fact, these events are actual incidences which have been reported by the Times of Eswatini.
While it would sound like such cases do not happen, health officials and undertakers confirm that this has continued to happen with many emaSwati being taken from their deathbeds, to a mortuary and then buried, without their deaths being officially reported.
These were not isolated acts of grief, but part of a quiet, alarming pattern emerging across Eswatini: the dead are reaching mortuaries without a medical word, certified only by relatives, leaving no official record of how they truly died and burying the evidence along with them.
An investigation by Eswatini News has uncovered a systemic breakdown in the official certification of death, particularly outside hospitals.
This breach in procedure is creating a shadow land of unverified deaths, potentially obscuring foul play, denying justice and skewing the nation’s vital health statistics.
The issue has been reignited by the public following recent reports of funeral mix-up where a family is said to have buried a wrong person. After this disturbing incident, residents expressed concern, members of the public, not referring to this incident, stated that some mortuaries do not confirm deaths using medical personnel.
According to the Births Marriages and Deaths Act of 1983, a death can be confirmed either by a medical officer or through an inquest by the police. Also, removing a body from a scene after a death has occurred is considered a criminal offence. This is considered a criminal offence if an authorised medical practitioner has not confirmed it.
Recently, a child who had died was also taken to a mortuary without medical personnel having certified the death. This publication gathered that the matter was neither reported to the police nor the hospital. Instead, family members only called someone from the funeral parlour to collect the body.
Once the person is buried, this means that the cause of death cannot be ascertained. Also, the registration of a death requires this information, including the cause of death (COD), which is normally stated by a medical officer.
“How then can the police verify the real cause of death?” asked one concerned *Java, echoing a growing public concern.
“If someone dies under questionable circumstances, but is buried without the police or a doctor, the truth is buried with them”, he added.
*Full article available on Pressreader*
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