- Dozens of buildings have been “hijacked” by crime syndicates in Johannesburg.
- A fire in a downtown block killed more than 70 people this week
- The city is facing a massive housing shortage for the poor
JOHANNESBURG, Sept 2 (Portal) – Like many impoverished residents of inner-city Johannesburg, Sihle Dube had rented a tiny room from someone who didn’t actually own it in a dilapidated building that became a trash-strewn haven for drugs and crime .
On Thursday, he woke up with a loud bang at 2 a.m. – one of the few things he remembered that night was checking the time on his phone – and jumped up to close the entrance to his apartment check.
Smoke rose.
“It was unbearable; I couldn’t breathe,” he said, covering his mouth for emphasis as he lay in a hospital bed the next day.
Dube slipped on his pants and tried to climb out of his second-floor window, but slipped on a satellite dish, fell and passed out. An ambulance took him to Bertha Gxowa Hospital in nearby Germiston.
More than 70 others did not make it out alive, one of Johannesburg’s worst disasters in living memory.
The deadly fire highlighted a problem that authorities have long failed to address: Johannesburg’s city center is so deserted by the economy and the state that gangs and extortionists have moved in to fill the void.
Dozens of abandoned buildings have been “hijacked” or taken over by criminal syndicates who charge fees to stay there. Angela Rivers, executive director of the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association, said she knew of 57 such buildings in the central business district alone, most of them owned by the city or provincial government.
Many have become seedy centers of drug trafficking and other lawlessness. Fires sometimes occur because residents rely on illegal electricity connections, gas burners and candles.
Investigators have not yet determined the cause of Thursday’s fire. But the brick apartment block, now gutted and blackened with soot, was such a building.
The Johannesburg city government leased it to a charity that provides shelter for women in 2016, but it had “finally served another purpose,” Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda told reporters later on the day of the fire, without elaborating.
A few years ago, the charity ran out of money and quietly ceased operations, leaving the building to fill with drug users and desperately poor migrants, residents said.
“People were selling drugs, taking drugs and prostituting themselves,” Dube said. “It was dirty; Water ran everywhere; garbage everywhere.”
Spokespeople for the City of Johannesburg and the police did not respond to requests for comment on the residents’ accounts. But Johannesburg city manager Floyd Brink said there was a plan to bring the hijacked buildings back under control. He gave no details and said it would require council approval.
“This has woken us up,” President Cyril Ramaphosa told reporters on Saturday. “Our cities and communities now have to pay attention to how people live.”
‘WE CRIED’
The building was a relic of South Africa’s apartheid past. Ramaphosa recalled going there to collect what black South Africans disdainfully called “dompas” – a “stupid pass” that allowed them to work in white areas of the city.
Decades of white minority rule, under which black people were forcibly relocated to townships and rural areas, have left South Africa experiencing some of the world’s worst extremes of wealth and poverty, as well as a critical housing shortage.
The arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants, many fleeing poverty and conflict elsewhere in Africa, in the decades since the end of apartheid in 1994 has deepened the housing crisis.
Dube, 49, grew up in Utrecht, a rural town in eastern South Africa at the foot of the Balele Mountains. But there was no work there, he said, so he moved to the country’s largest city in early 2001 to work as a security guard.
Sihle Dube, a survivor of a fatal fire in Johannesburg, is admitted to the Bertha Gxowa Hospital in Germiston, South Africa, on September 1, 2023. Portal/Thando Hlophe acquires license rights
His sister Ethel Jack, 60, moved later that decade to look for work.
They both got used to living in crowded buildings filled with shady characters who demanded rent for their “property,” they said. At one place where Jack stayed, every month at the end of the month a different man would knock on their door and demand his 400 rand ($21).
“If you don’t pay, they’ll chase you out of the building,” she said, standing in front of the rubble of the fire that nearly killed her brother, on a street covered in trash and cordoned off with police barbed wire.
Residents are often afraid to seek help because they risk being deported or threatened by landlords, Dube said.
When he first moved into the block in 2019, it was clean and not too crowded. A woman who had been put up there by the charity wanted to leave and he paid her R4,000 to keep the room as long as he wanted.
But since the charity stopped using it, the building has become a target for rent-seeking syndicates, he said.
“People claimed the rooms were theirs. They would say, ‘I have five rooms,’ and start renting them out,” he said.
In 2021, significantly more residents were crammed into the block. Garbage has accumulated; The building started to stink.
Although the cartels preyed on foreigners, it was cheaper than paying legitimate rent, said Chinte Mustafa, a 33-year-old food delivery driver from Malawi.
“Every month we cried because the rent money was gone,” he said, standing near the police barricade. So he moved into the building and paid R800 a month for a room.
“Now I don’t know where my family will live.”
“Eviction wouldn’t help”
In response to residents’ complaints, police arrested three people in 2021 for illegally collecting rent, Dube said. However, they threatened to cut off the illegally connected electricity, so residents did not dare call the authorities again.
In 2019, the municipality tried to evict the residents. But human rights groups have taken them to court, said Annie Michaels, an activist with the Johannesburg Migrants Advisory Panel, which supports migrants in the building.
“We told them eviction wouldn’t help,” she said. “They would have just left a lot of people homeless.”
The community relented, Michaels said, but “they just left the building as it was. They didn’t do anything else.”
Jack was shocked at the condition of the building and urged her brother Dube to move, but he never did. When family members heard about the fire, they feared the worst.
“We thought maybe he was one of the people who died,” Jack said.
Hours later he called the family from the hospital: he had survived.
($1 = 18.8361 Rand)
Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Alexandra Zavis and Ros Russell
Our standards: The Thomson Portal Trust Principles.
Acquire license rights, opens new tab