The Sunday News
This year marks a very special landmark for Nyaradzo Group as we celebrate our 20th anniversary of service after opening our doors to the public on the 1st of March 2001. At the time of launch, we were a no-name brand, a company with an indigenous-sounding name when all others had or chose European sounding ones.
Undaunted by the weight of colonial baggage, we chose to take the bull by its horns and called ourselves by the name Nyaradzo. We knew then as we do now that the name would, someday, become our biggest asset as more and more people discover who they really are and identify with their roots.
Today, Nyaradzo is the name that invokes so much pride in our fellow Zimbabweans anywhere in the world, not least because of our name, but also because of the way we have conducted ourselves over the past 20 years — bringing convenience and excellence to an industry that not only deals with the dead but was dead itself.
In the 20 years of our being, we have become the largest funeral assurance company in the land as well as the second largest life office with branches in almost every corner of the country.
In addition, we have set up offices in South Africa and England, becoming not only a regional player but a global one, thanks to our valued customers.
We have been crowned the most customer centric company in the country not once but many times. Our most recent recognition is that of the company with the highest customer satisfaction index in Zimbabwe, in the Zimbabwe Customer Satisfaction Index (ZimCSI) survey under the auspices of the Chartered Institute of Customer Management. We have also been awarded the Superbrand crown on many occasions and we continue to fight in the corner of the customers.
Having started off with a small number of staff, our payroll now has more than 1 500 employees and still counting.
These are evenly distributed by gender, with our graduate trainee scheme helping in securing the Group’s future to transcend generations to come.
We have also grown into an integrated financial service provider which is on the cusp of transforming into a high-tech business whose innovations serve to make life easier for our customers. Looking back to the 20 years of our existence, ours has been an unforgettable journey, whose purpose goes beyond making financial gain; we derive gratification from providing solutions to meet the needs of our customers, and helping communities around us thrive.
When Nyaradzo cut its teeth in the industry, there weren’t many non-indigenous funeral directors as there are now and it was quite conspicuous that the focus was on “burying the dead”, rather according a decent and befitting send off to our loved ones in accordance with our cultural norms and traditions. Not only were we entering a sector dominated by established brands, most of which dated back to colonial Rhodesia, we were also setting up shop at a time when the economic challenges bedevilling the country today had begun to run riot.
To add fuel to the disbelievers’ misgivings, we had gone against popular convention and given ourselves an indigenous name. But like the Biblical David who floored the giant Goliath, our customers have gracefully lifted us to pole position.
Our entry revolutionised the industry with ground-breaking innovations that removed the burden of going through the loss of a loved one from our customers onto our shoulders. We thus became the bearers of love and hope, and led the way in providing buses for mourners, tents and chairs, water bowsers, floodlights and other conveniences that make up for the infrastructural inadequacies confronting our public amenities.
Nyaradzo Life Assurance Company (NLACO) has taken the market by storm, riding on the goodwill earned by its forerunners.
Before NLACO came on stream, we had invested in a coffin manufacturing unit in Ruwa, Calundike Exports, which has expanded its portfolio to include office furniture and spectacular kitchens.
Eureka Insurance Brokers is yet another of the Group’s units responsible for taking care of the market’s short-term insurance needs.
The most recent additions to our stable are Sahwira Events and Lifestyle, Nyaradzo Asset Management and Sahwira Bureau de Change, which are part of the Group’s ecosystem.
Across the country, Nyaradzo has been able to build state-of-the art infrastructure where customers can walk in and get first-class service from our professional consultants who are trained to support the needs of our strategic business units under one roof.
The thirst to become a global player with Zimbabwean roots has taken us into South Africa and the United Kingdom, where we were welcomed with open arms.
As we celebrate our 20th birthday, we are however, finding our operating environment bearing some resemblance to the situation we found ourselves in when we started, even though the context and scale are different.
The Covid-19 respiratory disease has altered our way of life in ways that we had not imagined before. Crucially, it has tested the foundations of our business; just as well, we had long taken the decision to invest in tangible assets to support service delivery, otherwise we could have been found wanting. Going into mortal combat with this invisible enemy has meant that we forego the things that we had become accustomed to and adopting new ways of navigating through the pandemic.
The mantra these days is that of maintaining physical distance, masking up, sanitising our hands regularly and wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline staff, while pinning our hopes on Government to scale up the pace and scale of vaccination. The harsh reality we found ourselves in as an industry is that we are now restricted from performing our burial rites and arranging befitting send-offs for our loved ones that give us moments to mourn and celebrate the time we shared with them.
With funeral attendance currently being restricted to 30 people, those who are techno-savvy are turning to livestreaming proceedings so that other mourners could keep track from the comforts of their homes and offices.
Because funerals are conducted for the living to allow for emotional closure, our expectation is that it won’t be long before the situation normalises to avoid the long-term effects of avoiding or ignoring the grieving process, while providing us the opportunity to avail psycho-social support during the grieving process.
Covid-19 has also put enormous strain on the industry, which is unable to pass the full risk pricing to the customer.
This is against the background where, for some, premiums had not loaded the pandemic risk factor, resulting in the depletion of reserves due to unbudgeted expenses. The acquisition of PPEs has also increased the cost of service provision by as much as US$500 per one funeral service and there is no cost recovery mechanism for this.
Even though currently there is no evidence of any kind of state-sponsored bail out for industry and commerce, the infrastructure that we had built over the years (hearses and mortuaries) has been our lifeline.
Faced with an entirely new set of challenges spawned by the Covid-19 pandemic, we have adopted the eagle mentality of riding majestically on the wind, as we also dedicate our resources towards local and global efforts to fight Covid-19, which has so far claimed the lives of over 2,5 million people worldwide. Through research and development, we have churned out ICT innovations that connect our strategic business units; automate our policy creation, premium payment, policy servicing and client servicing processes.
Along the way, we have also built sustainable partnerships with our suppliers, including our bankers, who are a phone call away when we need anything from them.
Our board of directors have also inspired our success through their valuable insights and guidance, with my colleagues in management giving their all in steering the Nyaradzo ship through crises and moulding it into a business for the future.
We have surrounded ourselves with teams of employees whose focus is on our value chains. These apply themselves with professionalism, diligence and dedication that separate our brand from our competition.
In spite of the challenges the economy is going through, Nyaradzo remains rooted on solid foundations, and has the agility to respond to the exigencies of the obtaining environment.
The anticipated recovery in agriculture, mining and tourism sectors as well as the various initiatives that are meant to reboot our economy form part of the tailwinds emboldening our hopes for a brighter future.
Having set our sights on being a high-tech business, our philosophy will not veer off from satisfying the customer’s needs, taking care of our environment and cementing the fabric of society over profit.
We are of the strong conviction that a sole focus on short-term gains will not drive the positive change we need, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Through thinking in the longer term, we have been involving ourselves in efforts to rehabilitate the environment through tree planting and supporting the education sector with a bias towards sciences so that we don’t reach planetary boundaries.
We cannot agree more with the school of thought that says a company is not just a balance sheet. It is also customers, local and global communities and society — and the natural environment, the world in which we live.
These long neglected factors must be carefully considered.
We are therefore aiding efforts to make our societies better places to live in and supporting frontline and other essential workers who may experience extreme stress and fatigue due to their work.
We are also encouraged and supportive of industry conversations around considerations for zero duty on disinfecting or Covid-19 containment equipment which may not be locally available; tax holidays or rebates for projects undertaken by assurers to boost capacity; rebates for verifiable cost of PPE; waiver of regulatory levies in the interim and reduction of Prescribed Assets Ratio to free funds for investment in assets.
It is encouraging that the Government is warming up to these conversations that are good for the whole industry.
As we look into the future, priority will continue to be on serving our customers to the best of our abilities, with the health and safety of our staff, including that of our customers, being non-negotiable.
I am inviting you, our stakeholders — especially our customers — to join us in toasting for a brighter future as we celebrate our 20th birthday.
