The Gauteng government has gone to court to apply for eviction orders to move people illegally occupying buildings in Johannesburg, irrespective of their nationality, human settlements MEC Lebogang Maile said on Monday.
Last Thursday at least 74 people died and scores of others were injured in a fire at a hijacked five-storey building in central Johannesburg.
Maile said the provincial government started a process to evict illegal occupiers a while ago. “We will go back to the courts” for eviction orders, he said. “Whether they are foreigners or South Africans, anyone who is occupying [a building] illegally” will be evicted.
Asked what would happen in the interim, Maile said: “We need the courts to evict them. We are a law-abiding government. We are governed by the constitution. You can’t remove people unless you have a court order.”
Former Johannesburg mayor and ActionSA president Herman Mashaba said that when he left office in 2019 his administration had identified more than “600 hijacked buildings” in the central business district. Of those, 154 had been “passed through council and awarded to the private sector to build affordable accommodation”.
President Cyril Ramaphosa said serious questions must be asked about bylaws not being enforced in large parts of some cities, and how the laws and regulations designed to protect tenants from arbitrary eviction were used by criminal “slumlords” to prey on society’s most vulnerable.
Responsibilities
In his weekly ANC newsletter, Ramaphosa said it is also important to ask questions about the responsibility of owners and landlords of inner-city buildings in SA that have either been abandoned or fallen into ruin.
The president said it should be asked how almost 200 people were allowed to occupy a building that was not built for housing, was unsafe and had no basic services.
He said SA has progressive laws and housing policies, including the emergency housing programme.
“There are landmark court judgments on the rights of tenants and the responsibilities of the state to people facing eviction, regardless of their immigration status. We need to examine how our policies are being implemented and how they can be improved,” he said.
But Socio-Economic Rights Institute of SA executive director Nomzamo Zondo said: “The emergency housing programme, which forms part of the National Housing Code, should guide the government’s action. The [programme] provides that migrants can be beneficiaries of housing assistance in emergency circumstances and provides that they may have to explain their status to home affairs.”
According to City of Joburg public safety political head Mgcini Tshwaku: “Part of our strategy has been to make provision of temporary housing for residents who live in these inhabitable buildings, and to move the occupants in small groups at a time, while the city makes plans for permanent low-cost housing alternatives.
“We continue to fight for a thorough audit of all buildings and ascertain who the owners and landlords are as a way of rooting out the building hijackers and those who illegally run these noncompliant buildings.”
With Sisanda Mbolekwa
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.