Dirty officials allow clean suburbs to rot
AS TRITE and heartless as it might sound, the explosion of violence in Rosettenville, the suburb in the south of Johannesburg – which has been in the news of late – was bound to happen.
Many will remember Rosettenville as the suburb in which the reggae superstar Lucky Dube was gunned down while dropping off a colleague some years ago.
Those with a sense of history will remember Rosettenville as a peaceful suburb, mainly populated by South Africans of Portuguese extraction. To many, it was “Little Lisbon”, a close-knit community.
With the demise of apartheid, Rosettenville, because it was cheaper than many suburbs in the north, attracted many black South Africans and their fellow brothers from across the borders – hardworking people who were eager to own houses in the suburbs.
But the changing profile of the suburb attracted not only the hardworking people – whose aim was to be closer to work – but insalubrious elements also moved in.
Change, when it happens at an overwhelming pace and is unchecked by officialdom, can sometimes end in disaster.
I saw first-hand this suburb degenerate into something I could not recognise. Almost every street had three or four spaza shops and shebeens. This deteriorated even further when some drinking places became veritable dens of iniquity where everything was for sale: from drugs to sex to fake passports and IDs to human cargo.
The rot could have been arrested right from the onset had the councillors and municipal officials put their foot down – firstly on the issue of residential properties being turned into commercial concerns conducting their business brazenly, and outside the law. Councillors and municipal officials who could have maintained a semblance of order and respectability here looked the other way after their palms were greased.
But this is not a new phenomenon. We have seen it in Albert Park, in Durban; we’ve seen it in Elsies River in Cape Town. And in many other parts of the country where officials allow drug lords and whoremongers to operate brazenly in communities – just as long as their own pockets have been lined.
Having accepted the accursed pieces of silver, they drive to their own peaceful suburbs, unperturbed by the riff-raff they have been instrumental in creating.
The horrific reality of this is that when the violence explodes it becomes almost uncontrollable. Sadly, it also assumes a xenophobic character. The locals want to transfer the blame on “the other”.
Yes, there are foreigners who, emboldened by the fact that they are undocumented, proceed to commit crimes knowing they cannot be traced. But they always operate in cahoots with local people – home affairs officials and others.
However, most foreigners are not criminals. They are hard-working individuals who left their countries for many reasons: political upheaval, economic depredation and sheer optimism.
They see business opportunities where locals can’t – and that’s exactly what South Africans are doing elsewhere on the continent.
Nigeria and Kenya have embraced South Africans doing business there. But those countries have succeeded in making sure that we operate legally within their borders. We should be doing the same.
We should ensure that the foreigners within our borders are allowed to operate their businesses, or to perform tasks that locals are not adept at – but this should happen legally, and in a manner that is not disruptive to the civic spirit.
Sadly, greedy, corrupt South Africans in public office are not only encouraging the breaking of the law, they are also inadvertently creating a schism between locals and foreigners.
As a long-standing citizen of Johannesburg who makes it his business to try to understand how the city works, I cannot help but observe that the suburb of Yeoville might experience what has happened in Rosettenville.
In the past few days in Rosettenville, about 10 houses were torched by members of the community who blamed the occupants for selling drugs and running brothels.
Yeoville, which was for a long time, a vibrant, clean, safe neighbourhood, has been allowed to rot. Residential flats and houses have been turned into shebeens and nightclubs. Others are now premises of shady churches – all of this without proper official rezoning. Residents have complained ad nauseam, to no avail.
Because there’s a huge presence of expatriates in Yeoville, it is not difficult to imagine how the tensions can deteriorate into a fight between “us” and “them”.
Officials are fully aware of what is happening. When the suburb explodes, they will pretend as if they are in shock, when the writing was on the wall for a long time.
“Officials allow drug lords and whoremongers to operate as long as their own pockets are lined