They stood there through the long night. Colleagues of the young woman who worked at Identity Clothing, joined by other Emaswati who refused to leave. Under the harsh lights of emergency vehicles at Bhunu Mall in Manzini, they waited. Some cried quietly. Others held each other. When the body was finally brought out in the early hours of the morning, the sound of uncontrolled weeping cut through the cold air. Firefighters from ENFRES and police officers carried the white-covered form. The colleagues who had kept vigil all night watched as their workmate was taken away, pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a health facility.
She had been trapped under the rubble since about 5:30pm the previous afternoon, after part of the mall’s roof collapsed following a burst water pipe. The search lasted through the night. By 4:20am she was located. By around 5:00am she was gone.
And then came the silence.
No public statement of mourning. No official words of condolence from the mall management. No word from Identity Clothing. No statement from the Municipal Council of Manzini. In the hours after a worker lost her life on their premises, the institutions responsible for the space and the people inside it offered the public nothing. No acknowledgement of the human cost. No expression of grief. No acceptance of responsibility.
This is more than a tragic accident. It is a public relations disaster of the most painful kind — the kind measured not in bad headlines, but in the absence of basic human decency.
A Night of Waiting, a Morning of Business
While emergency teams worked and colleagues kept their painful vigil, the rest of the city slept. When morning came, something even more jarring happened. Some shops as reported by various media outlets at Bhunu Mall opened for business. Life, it seemed, was expected to continue as if the rubble and the body and the overnight tears had not occurred.
The mall itself has a troubled recent history. Two years ago a fire gutted parts of the complex. It has been undergoing renovations ever since. A burst water pipe and a collapsing roof raise serious questions about structural safety, oversight, and whether enough was done to protect the people who work there every day. Those questions remain unanswered because no one in authority has stepped forward to address them.
The Cost of Saying Nothing
In public relations, silence in the face of human tragedy is never neutral. It communicates something. It tells the public that the institution places more value on avoiding liability, protecting its image, or returning to normal operations than on recognising the life that was lost. It tells the grieving colleagues who stood outside all night that their pain is inconvenient. It tells every other worker in that mall that their safety is secondary.
The Municipal Council of Manzini, charged with the welfare and safety of the city, has so far offered no public accounting. Mall management has not spoken. The employer has not issued even a brief statement of sorrow. In a country where community and shared mourning still matter, this collective muteness feels like a second injury.
The young woman’s colleagues did what institutions failed to do. They showed up. They stayed. They grieved openly. Their presence through the night was a quiet rebuke to the empty space where official compassion should have been.
What Accountability Looks Like
A proper response did not require legal admissions of guilt. It required simple, human leadership: a clear statement acknowledging the death, expressing sorrow to the family and colleagues, committing to a transparent investigation, and assuring the public that safety will be prioritised. It required the courage to pause business as usual long enough to honour a life.
Instead, the public received rubble, a body bag, and open shop doors.
This is the anatomy of a PR disaster. Not a poorly worded press release, but the decision to say nothing when something needed to be said. Not a crisis of messaging, but a crisis of basic humanity.
The people who waited through the night at Bhunu Mall already know what the institutions have not yet accepted: that a workplace death demands more than rescue operations and cleared debris. It demands recognition. It demands accountability. It demands that those in positions of responsibility look the public in the eye and speak.
Until that happens, the silence will remain the loudest sound coming from Bhunu Mall.
May Her Precious Soul Rest in Peace 🕊️🕊️
“… Uma kushay’ iskhathi sokubuy’ ekhaya ngingabuyi, Cela nazi ukuthi kade ngozama
Kade ngozama mina, kade ngozama, Ngizamel’ abantwana basekhaya… ” – by Kabza De Small & Dlala Thukzin (featuring Sykes, Young Stunna, Nkosazana Daughter, Tracy, Thatohatsi and others).
PR Watchdog 