It will be five years tomorrow that the Bank of Lisbon building was engulfed in flames and three firefighters — Simphiwe Moropane, Mduduzi Ndlovu and Khathutshelo Muedi — lost their lives. The building — which had housed provincial government departments — and all its 26 floors, was demolished a little over a year later.
Not too far from that building, on the other side of Commissioner Street where Delvers Street meets Albert Street, more than 70 lives were lost last week in the Usindiso building inferno, the most tragic example of the human cost of postapartheid inner-city decay and its link to so many other issues — immigration, housing, unemployment and the enforcement of building regulations, and the challenges of city governance.
In the past few months Johannesburg, which for nearly 150 years has attracted people from far and wide, has been the site of the tragic and the bizarre — the cat-and-mouse game between zama zamas and the police, a series of earth tremors, an underground explosion that sent minibus taxis flying, and most recently that terrible fire in the inner city.
As Sipho Sithole notes in his book Maye Maye, the same building housed the labour bureau that enforced influx control back in the day, a critical feature of the labour monopsony at the heart of the apartheid economic model. That monopsony staked a claim to the vibrant energy of men of working age within our borders and the region, in places nearby like Lesotho and Mozambique and as far as Malawi and the Congo.
It is the height of cruel irony that the building that enforced apartheid through pencil strokes has burned under the weight of the urban housing problems that naturally arose with the end of influx control.
It is deeply concerning that three related decoy narratives have emerged. The first is that African migrants who are in SA without documentation deserve to die in an inferno. The second, that the tragedy can be used in the political blame game as a chess piece in the pageantry of electoral politics.
Third, the scapegoating of the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from & Unlawful Occupation of Land Act of 1998, and the NGOs who use the law to petition the courts to order the provision of alternative houses for those at risk of eviction from such buildings.
With regard to the latter, it bears mentioning that the availability to unlawful occupants of “suitable alternative accommodation or land” is one of three other factors the courts consider in granting an eviction order. It is not the only consideration.
All of these decoy narratives overlook the historic and contemporary drivers of urban decay in SA cities, and the circumstances under which unlawful occupation of state- and privately-owned buildings occurs.
These circumstances are not just about the patent criminality of building hijackers, or the corrupt issuers of fire certificates or enforcers on the take who overlook the undocumented. It is about this and the investor flight of the 1990s, deindustrialisation, a crisis of underinvestment, collapsing inter-governmental relations and a deepening inability of regional institutions such as the Southern African Development Community to manage the push-and-pull factors that give rise to economic migration.
Transforming the exploitive economic and socially undesirable features of the regional economy such as migrant labour, which is still deeply entrenched, remains a challenge. For as long as regional economic development remains unevenly distributed, poor economic migrants will remain at the mercy of shysters and syndicates who opportunistically hijack buildings with the witting and unwitting support of property owners who neglect their responsibilities.
Without meaningful consideration of this challenge through the development of integrated regional and continental value chains, many will remain trapped in this vicious cycle of history, with no prospect of escape.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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