Sukoluhle James's family seeks funds to bury her after she died of suspected food poisoning.
Image: Supplied
A heartbroken grandmother is pleading for financial assistance to bury her one-year-old granddaughter, who tragically died from suspected food poisoning after eating a packet of noodles.
Sukoluhle James died in the early hours of Tuesday, May 27, after falling ill during the night.
Her grandmother, Nomzamo Dlambula, described the devastating events leading up to the toddler’s death.
“It was around 1am when she passed on Tuesday morning,” Dlambula said.
“She ate the noodles for supper and that was the last thing she ate, and then around 11pm, I was woken up by her, she was crying.
“When I asked her mother why she was crying, she said she didn’t know and they came to my room.”
Dlambula said she immediately sensed something was wrong.
“I could see that she was not alright. We couldn’t even take her to hospital as she passed away. The post-mortem said that it was food poisoning that killed her.”
According to Dlambula, her daughter had attended a birthday party earlier in the day and brought the noodles home from a friend’s cupboard.
“She got home and then made supper for her daughter. The friend said she bought the noodles from a shop in Wynberg. She said she also fed her children the same noodles but nothing happened to them.
“I think maybe this was a factory fault, and we can’t focus on tracking down the company because we are struggling to put funds together to bury Sukoluhle and we are not sure where to go.”
Dlambula said the family has been seeking help from their local councillor and other community members, but the process has been slow.
“We are stressing because my granddaughter’s body has been in the mortuary for more than a week and we thought by now we would have received help,” she added.
Anyone willing to assist the Dlambula family can contact Nomzamo Dlambula directly on 073 478 5715.
Multiple cases of food poisoning prompted various organisations to stage a peaceful march in November last year, urging the government to close down spaza shops in order to safeguard public health.
The handful of marchers walked about 1.8km from their meeting point at Sandelhout Street to the Delft Civic Centre to hand over a memorandum of grievances.
It followed the Food and Allied Workers’ Union (Fawu) that called out health inspectors in Cape Town for neglecting townships, after a meat factory was nabbed for allegedly adding dog food to their sausage.
A tip-off in November led the City’s Environmental Health Service to a building in Mfuleni, which resulted in the uncovering of the sausage that was processed and packaged in unsanitary conditions.
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