In eviction Catch-22
ing Mhlambo hopes she will not be made to leave.
When Dladla and her fellow residents were evicted in 2012 — in a much-contested process — the Concourt ruled that they could not simply be turned out on the street. There was talk about setting up tents for them, but eventually everyone was offered space in a R600-amonth city housing scheme. Those who could not afford that rental were placed in the Ekuthuleni shelter under a contract between the city and the nonprofit Metropolitan Evangelical Services.
When her health allows it Dladla (55) is an informal trader like Mhlambo. She too says she cannot provide anywhere near the amount of money required to rent a space in the city, where she must be to make her living. That is true of her fellow residents.
“Those of us who are formally employed do casual, mostly parttime work as cleaners or general labourers,” she says. “We live at the shelter because we have nowhere else to go.”
When Dladla’s case was before the Supreme Court of Appeal, the court said the free accommodation at Ekuthuleni, with its biometric security control, daily cleaning and TV room, meant a higher living standard than what the residents used to have in their decaying Berea building.
Dladla strongly disagrees. The rules of the shelter, she says, which include splitting people by gender and a requirement that residents vacate it between 8am and 5:30pm, makes for conditions that can be “profoundly humiliating”.
When not allowed into what they consider their homes, Dladla says, residents are forced to wander around the city, sitting in parks or taking shelter where they can regardless of the weather. The rules “made us feel like children”, she says, as if by merely being in a shelter residents could not control their own lives.
The City of Johannesburg — first under ANC control, now governed by the Democratic Alliance — is blunt about how it perceives Dladla’s complaints. The city’s housing director, Patrick Phophi, says the shelter was never intended to be a home and its residents “are not free to do the things which they might choose to do in their own home”.
If the city were to drop its policy of same-sex, dormitory-style accommodation in shelters, Phophi says, it would be able to house fewer people. If it were to provide space fit to be inhabited during the day rather than just a place to sleep at night, it would cost more.
This, he argues, would be at the expense of people every bit as much in need as Dladla — especially if the Concourt were to decide that the dignity of thousands of people like Dladla and Mhlambo must be prioritised.
But when this dilemma was put to them, the residents said they could only argue for what should be theirs. Their children deserved shelter, their elderly deserved their self-respect and it was up to the Concourt to find a way to ensure it, they said.
But in a city where acute need is everywhere, not everyone sees it their way.
“I don’t live for free,” said a resident in a building overlooking Kiribilly. “It feels to me like everyone who lives for free costs me money.”