A year after Johannesburg building fire, survivors feel abandoned by city

Sibongile Majavava sits outside her small tent shack at the Wembley Stadium homeless shelter on the eastern outskirts of Johannesburg, her third temporary home since a deadly fire tore through the building she was living in a year ago.The 34-year-old South African, her Tanzanian partner, Muhdi, 36, and their toddler have been hoping to get back on their feet since the August 2023 blaze in the dilapidated Usindiso building in the inner city killed 76 people and left hundreds homeless.But a year later, surrounded by tents and makeshift dwellings in the former sports stadium-turned-shelter, the couple feel hopeless and abandoned by those they thought would help them.“Life here is very hard,” said Majavava, who has no income and worries about keeping track of her three-year-old because of crime at the shelter. She needs to buy the child shoes, she said, because of used drug needles and other dangerous rubbish lying on the ground.Bad housingIn 2018, the government installed container homes, water, electricity and standalone ablution units at Wembley, which also houses survivors of the 2017 Cape York building fire and people the city evicted from a derelict building called Fattis Mansions.Building fires have become common in downtown Johannesburg, where hundreds of what city officials call “hijacked” buildings have been taken over by criminal cartels. These gangs partition off rooms and rent them out illegally to poor and desperate people – while offering no services like functioning water, electricity or sewage, which creates unsafe living conditions.Usindiso was in a similar state by the time the deadly fire happened last August, with a commission of inquiry into the blaze finding that it housed 200 shacks “partitioned with highly flammable material.”The commission’s report, released in May, found the City of Johannesburg liable for neglecting Usindiso as well as 200 other buildings in a similar state of dilapidation in Johannesburg.The city has ‘failed’“The city has failed to fulfil its constitutional obligation to provide decent housing,” said Siyabonga Mahlangu, a representative for the Inner City Federation (ICF), an advocacy group fighting evictions in Johannesburg.While the conditions in hijacked buildings are dire, housing activists like Mahlangu say the city’s solutions – like the Wembley shelter – are not much better.Six years since the first residents were moved there, in what was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, people feel forgotten.“The conditions at Wembley are not good at all,” Mahlangu said, likening the tents to living on the street.Wembley itself is dusty, with heaps of rubbish beside the makeshift homes. Young men, most unemployed, drink alcohol in the middle of the day while playing loud music as several children run around. A previous count by the city put the number of people living there at about 500.Mahlangu said since the first evictees from hijacked inner-city buildings were relocated to Wembley in 2017, the shelter has not been maintained and residents are terrorised by crime.Yet, “the city acts like they are doing them a favour” by letting them stay there, he told Al Jazeera.'Still reviewing'Edward Molopi, a senior advocate at legal rights group the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), which assists people facing eviction, said the crisis is part of a broader conversation about the city’s responsibility to provide alternative housing for people it displaces.“According to law, if eviction is going to end up in homelessness, the city is supposed to provide alternative accommodation,” he told Al Jazeera, referencing an older ruling by the Constitutional Court.Although the municipality provided the relocation site, it “has failed to maintain and upkeep the premises," he said.Responding to Al Jazeera’s request for comment, Sibonelo Mtshali, the spokesperson for the City of Johannesburg’s human settlements department, said a member of the mayoral office was “still reviewing the situation at Usindiso building and homeless shelters since he recently took office this August."- AL JAZEERA

A year after Johannesburg building fire, survivors feel abandoned by city

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Namibian Sun 2025-04-04

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A year after Johannesburg building fire, survivors feel abandoned by city

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Namibian Sun 2025-04-04

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