Re: With Johannesburg's building fire, the misery of negro gang-hijacked towers comes into focus

[Uno Ball]

On 01 Sep 2023, sporging rudy <now...@protonmail.com> posted some

> This is what happens when niggers are in charge of a city.


The building that caught on fire is in what's still called the
Central Business District, even though big corporations have long
moved out to the safer suburbs, leaving behind abandoned office
spaces that, in South African parlance, have now become "hijacked."

That means people desperate for housing in a country where
unemployment is among the highest in the world — officially at 33%
but likely much higher — have taken to squatting in squalid
conditions in the multi-story buildings, forced to pay rent to the
criminal gangs that now run them.

This is nothing new in this city of 6 million but made headlines
this week after the worst fire in recent memory prompted renewed
calls for action and led to much political finger-pointing.
Authorities are still investigating what exactly caused the
disaster.

Jumping from windows
Survivors of the fire, which broke out early Thursday morning,
described how they were unable to get out of the five-story
building's exit because security gates were locked. Some jumped from
windows and one mother threw her baby wrapped in a blanket out of a
second-floor window to safety.

After fire-fighters extinguished the blaze, forensics teams
collected remains, with white body bags laid out in the street in
neat rows. Desperate family members searched for loved ones, while
survivors huddled with the sparse belongings they'd rescued —
blankets, a boombox.

Prudence Ndlovu, 29, stood in a crowd behind a police cordon,
staring at the charred and gutted building that was her only home.

Paying rent to cartels
A Zimbabwean, Ndlovu is, like many of the fire's victims, a migrant
from a poorer African country who came to Johannesburg — often
dubbed "The City of Gold" — looking for a better life but
encountering crime and xenophobia.

She said she paid the cartel who had hijacked the building 1,200
South African rands a month in rent, about $60. For that she lived
in a makeshift shack erected within the building with her two
children and boyfriend.

Inside, the haphazardly partitioned buildings have broken windows,
dark stairwells, piles of garbage and sewage, and people's few
belongings — a dirty mattress, a cooking pot.

For some privacy many living in buildings like this use bits of
wood, curtains and cardboard to divide their space — all highly
flammable materials, especially when many residents cook on fires in
large metal drums or use candles when the illegal electricity
connection attached to the squat fails.

While the exact cause of the fire isn't known, residents and some
officials have suggested that candles could have been what sparked
it. South Africa is in the midst of a power crisis and there was a
blackout at the time, residents said.

Ndlovu, who ekes out a living selling snacks on the street, told NPR
she had "lost everything" in the fire. She said herself and her
children had only survived because they'd spent the night of the
fire staying at her sister's house.

"When I see today happening this thing, I think God was the one
moving me there," she said. "I see ... the other lady lose the child
and the other child is in hospital."

At least 12 children died in the fire.

Authorities don't enter
Meanwhile, Mthabiseng Maimane, from a neighboring apartment block,
complains criminal elements in such hijacked buildings are
contributing to Johannesburg's already shockingly high crime rates.

"What is happening here, the things that we see every day, we're not
even safe. ... How do the people take over the buildings?"

"Even for my kids, I fear for my kids ... they can't even go outside
to play," she said, adding that there are drug gangs and crystal
meth addicts in the abandoned tower blocks.

The security is so precarious that even the police are scared to
enter the city's hijacked buildings — of which there are believed to
be dozens.

Lebogang Isaac Maile, the head of the provincial Department of Human
Settlements, said the fire "demonstrates a chronic problem of
housing in our province as we've previously said that there's at
least 1.2 million people who need housing."

"There are cartels who prey on who are vulnerable people. Because
some of these buildings, if not most of them, are actually in the
hands of those cartels who collect rental from the people," he told
media.

The building at 80 Albert St. that burned this week — and which
officials say may have housed as many as 200 families — has a
history that's testament to South Africa's dark past.

It started out during the apartheid era as a building used by the
white minority government to enforce its racist laws. It was an
office for Black people to obtain their "passes" — documents that
controlled their movement in the segregated city.

After the dawn of South Africa's democracy in 1994, the building
became a shelter for abused women and children. When that moved out,
the building — which is still owned by the city — became "hijacked."
The building last had a safety inspection in 2019, the year gangs
took it over, according to Rapulane Monageng, acting chief of
Johannesburg emergency medical services.

"We wouldn't want to go back in there in a hostile environment,"
Monageng told local media about why after that it was left alone.

Some officials blame the country's strong anti-eviction laws for
making it too hard to remove people once they've occupied a
building. Though nongovernmental organizations say these are
essential to protecting the dispossessed. And there's also the
question of where to move them to.

President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the site in the aftermath of the
tragedy, saying it was a "wake-up call" regarding the city's
affordable housing crisis.

However, opposition groups say the government has known about and
neglected the problem for years. They say billions of rands have
been lost to corruption over the years that could instead have been
used to build housing for the poor.

But that's cold comfort for those now displaced by Thursday's fire,
and for the many South Africans and foreign migrants living
precarious existences in Johannesburg's remaining hijacked buildings
— any one of which could be another disaster waiting to happen.

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/01/1197205894/johannesburg-building-
fire-hijacked-gangs-south-africa