JOHANNESBURG (AP) — One of the few things that has survived the fire and smoke that caused at least 76 horrific deaths in a dilapidated Johannesburg apartment block is a round memorial plaque hanging on the brown brick facade. It contains a five-sentence inscription describing the history of the building.
No. 80 Albert Street – the scene of one of South Africa’s worst inner-city tragedies – was a central pass point during the apartheid era of racial segregation, a checkpoint for enforcing a despised law that controlled the movement of black people almost anywhere in the country.
Without a work permit from the apartheid government, the people of Johannesburg were “denied a place,” the inscription reads.
What it doesn’t say is that people were still excluded from the building until last Thursday, almost 30 years after the end of apartheid, when a fire swept through it, killing dozens of South Africans and poor foreign migrants living on the margins of society. killed a city that claims to be the richest in Africa.
The approximately 200 families living there were desperately looking for accommodation and found a five-story apartment block that had fallen into disrepair and been abandoned by the authorities. They paid rent to unofficial “landlords” who had taken over the building illegally.
This is what is known in Johannesburg as the “hijacked building”. There are hundreds of them in the crumbling city center.
They embody the decline of South Africa’s most important city and, moreover, what so many see as the greater failure of a post-apartheid government to provide dignified lives for many of the poor black majority.
What apparently angered South Africans after the overnight fire that killed entire families was city officials’ admission that it was a municipal building. Yet they had taken no responsibility for it or for its residents, who lived in shacks crammed into every corner, even in the parking garage.
“This has been a long time coming and will continue until the city wakes up. “It’s devastating,” said Angela Rivers, executive director of the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association. Rivers said that numerous government agencies are aware of the appalling conditions of hijacked buildings throughout the city center, but “they are not taking it seriously.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the scene of the fire, standing among the poor in downtown Johannesburg and trying to calm them down.
“We are a caring government,” Ramaphosa said. “It may be insufficient, but the determination to look after the people of South Africa is a priority.”
The promises of the government of the ruling African National Congress party, which led South Africa out of apartheid and has been in power since the first democratic elections in 1994, are fading.
Johannesburg is a hotspot of perceived failures. The city’s infrastructure is in major trouble almost everywhere, from burst water pipes, cracked streets, a non-functioning power supply to piles of trash on street corners.
Founded just over 100 years ago on a vast gold reef, Johannesburg has always been a destination for black South Africans, initially men who left their wives and children behind to take steam trains into the city and work in the gold mines, a journey of the Jazz great Hugh Masekela sang about “Stimela”. It is one of South Africa’s most vibrant songs.
The city experienced rapid and recent urbanization following the repeal of apartheid and the abolition of its pass laws, rising from a population of 1.8 million in 1990 to an estimated 6 million today. People keep coming to the “City of Gold”.
What they are now finding is that the unemployment rate in the surrounding Gauteng province is 36% – higher even than South Africa’s national figure of 33%, which is itself the worst in the world. Around 1.2 million people in the province are homeless, officials said, with much of the crisis unfolding in Johannesburg.
“The general impression is that things have gotten worse over time,” said Lebogang Lechuba of the South African Cities Network, which analyzes urban development. “(But) more people are coming to the city. That doesn’t change.”
The warning signs for Johannesburg began in the late 1990s, when major companies left the city center and moved to the new financial district of Sandton, about 16 kilometers north. According to this year’s World’s Wealthiest Cities Report, Johannesburg still has more millionaires than any other city on the continent. But the gap between the silver high-rises of Sandton and the ancient heart of Johannesburg highlights why South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world.
As the money trickled out, central Johannesburg’s decline was slow at first, said corporate risk analyst Volker von Widdern, until it reached a tipping point.
“Maybe a domino will fall. “We don’t fully understand what the overall impact of the fall of 20 dominoes might be,” von Widdern told financial news website Moneyweb. “It has a cumulative impact and then unfortunately a catastrophic impact.”
Johannesburg voters have recently turned away from the ruling ANC, but that has not improved the city’s prospects and has only led to a series of political coalitions that have failed. The city has had six mayors in less than two years.
Failure of basic infrastructure also poses a much greater threat to a country’s social base, said Professor Yunus Ballim of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Ballim, a civil engineering expert, appeared on national television last month after an underground gas explosion in Johannesburg about a mile from Albert Street that was caused by poorly maintained pipes.
However, he began to talk about how any failure to provide South Africans with a house, running water and electricity undermines their confidence in their post-apartheid democracy, which guarantees freedom to every citizen and no longer passes laws but has it Housing or jobs have not yet been created for millions of people.
Ballim questioned why frustrated, poor protesters sometimes burn down clinics or schools.
“Perhaps … they have lost confidence in the clinic’s ability to do what it was supposed to do,” he said.
Rivers, whose association works with abandoned buildings in Johannesburg, said one of the most desperate situations she had experienced was a pregnant woman who went into labor alone in the wet, cold basement of a stolen property with no electricity or running water.
Rivers said the woman refused to go to a hospital because she was terrified of losing her apartment in the building and didn’t believe there would be another home for her and her child.
“This baby was born in the dark,” Rivers said.
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Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa.
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