Languishing in CBD squalor
What was supposed to be a temporary shelter for relocated families has turned into a hellhole for them and the hundreds of illegal tenants who occupy every available corner in the CBD building. Reporter Gabi Falanga and Chief photographer Chris Collingri
Magxwalisa Ndoyisile, 59, who relies on an oxygen tank to breathe, is just one of about 900 people – most of them squatters – crammed into central Joburg’s Moth building. They are squeezed into every available space, from lift shafts to filthy bathrooms and partitioned cells. Strangers, criminals and drug abusers live side by side, separated only by makeshift curtains. They are surrounded by stinking rubbish in a building ridden with health, safety and fire hazards. Some of the tenants were relocated there after being evicted from other buildings. They are waiting for the City of Joburg to either fix the place or find alternative accommodation for them. See our exclusive report and more pictures on
IN A bathroom, Lady Mkhize dresses her four-month-old daughter, J-Lo. The bathroom is her home. The door hardly opens, obstructed by the double bed that’s squeezed into the room.
Mkhize stands wedged between the bed and the wall while she pushes the press studs closed on the tiny girl’s Babygro.
She and four family members moved into the bathroom on the second floor in 2014 after a fire destroyed the third floor and most of their possessions.
The basins are covered with their personal effects. The shower cubicles are stuffed with clothing and other household items.
“We had to move here when there was the fire,” Mkhize explains.
“It’s not okay, but if we could find another place, it would be better.”
The former Moth (Memorable Order of Tin Hats) building was provided by the City of Joburg as transitional housing for the 147 people who were evicted from the Dina Glassware building in Carr Street, Newtown, in November 2009.
According to an order made by the high court in Joburg, the city agreed to house the people who were evicted.
The plan was to have them stay in the Moth building for 12 months.
A report by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (Seri) documented the struggles for access to adequate housing in the inner city and the challenges faced by people in relocation sites.
It indicated that the owners of the Carr Street building received several infringement notices since 2006 regarding the “unacceptable living conditions and lack of fire preparedness”.
The residents had been living in the Carr Street building since 1995.
In October 2007, the relocation process was accelerated when the new property owners, Chestnut Hill Investments, asked the city to provide alternative accommodation for the occupiers because they wanted to demolish the building and build a new retail development – what is now the New- town Junction mall – in time for the 2010 World Cup.
In August 2008, Chestnut Hill served the residents with a formal eviction application.
A year later, the matter was settled and the court ordered that the residents vacate the premises by November and the city accommodate them in the Moth building.
The Seri report stated: “The city is ordered to accommodate the residents at the Moth building for a period of 12 months. The building is clearly understood to be temporary accommodation to be used while the city and the residents seek alternative housing options.”
Other residents living in the Moth building include those relocated there after being evicted from two other innercity buildings, BG Alexander and Chancellor House, in 2009 and 2010.
Near the toilet where Mkhize is raising her baby, in the only functioning bathroom on the second floor, the stench has become unbearable.
The embarrassed residents point to the only toilet that works. The seat is missing and flies swarm around it.
The other toilets are covered with cardboard and bricks to indicate they’re unusable, except one where rotting excrement is packed to the brim.
“It’s a health hazard,” says resident Xolani Ngcongo. “The toilets are blocked from the basement to upstairs.”
Sheila Kadende adds: “We have only one toilet for men, women and children.”
As if to illustrate her point, a teenage girl shuffles through the sewage water covering the floor to get to the toilet.
The showers have no shower heads or taps, and piles of stinking rubbish lie in some of them.
Ngcongo, who was appointed temporary building manager after the previous one was allegedly fired in 2010, has established a committee of sorts, which tries to bring some form of order.
“When we came (in 2009), the building looked clean, it was fine, everything was functioning,” he says.
“(Now) we’re not very happy, we’re 100 percent angry. The conditions are very bad.”
The building has five floors, including the basement and ground floors, and as one walks from floor to floor, it becomes evident that any possible space that can be lived in is utilised.
On the rooftop, a woman has turned what used to be a lift shaft into a neat-asa-pin spaza shop. A baby sleeps on the bed behind her.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the building, there’s a rancid welcome to the basement. Rubbish overflows from a black municipal dustbin, and next to it, food waste lies exposed on the broken base of a bed.
The basement frequently floods during the summer rains, forcing occupants to move to the other, already packed floors.
But that’s not the basement dwellers’ only problem.
“Sometimes the basement dams up with sewage when there’s a blockage. The sewage used to go up so much that it touched here,” Ngcongo says, pointing to the ceiling.
“The city drained it. We didn’t force people to come back here; they came because it was squashed,” she says.
One of the large halls in the basement is filled by about 12 bunk beds.
In the middle of the room, two men stare fixedly at a tiny TV screen. It has no back cover and wires protrude from it.
In front of them, a two-plate electric stove burns red, but no one’s cooking.
Someone walks up to it and lights a cigarette. The room smells like smoke. “The department of nyaope,” the committee members joke.
A dark corner of the room is partitioned off with an old piece of cloth, and a rhythmic pssh, pssh, pssh sound can be heard coming from the suffocating darkness.
Behind it lies 59-year-old Magxwalisa Ndoyisile, connected by pipes to the large oxygen tank next to his bed.
“My lungs are f***ed up,” the frail man explains huskily. From tobacco and spraypaint from the cars,” he adds matterof-factly.
Next to the bed, on the cold concrete floor, stands his prosthetic leg and piles of pans, containers and clothing.
Another hall in the basement stinks of damp. Curtains, blankets and sheets are suspended from the ceiling to create makeshift bedrooms all along the walls. Small TVs, stoves and double beds are squeezed into these areas.
Originally, when the residents were moved into the building, the council drew up house rules with a plan for dormitory-style accommodation, where residents would be segregated by sex.
The residents disagreed with those terms because families would be split up and they would be forced to live without privacy.
“Husbands and wives were separated; we couldn’t be a family,” says Kadende.
But according to Seri, by the time the occupiers moved into the Moth building, the lease agreement and house rules had not been finalised, and over time, households began living together on the same floor and subdividing spaces for themselves.
Ngcongo adds: “It was like prisoner cells with bunk beds. Because people were looking for privacy, people needed to put curtains up. These curtains developed into boards.”
On the ground floor, what used to be a large dining hall is packed with makeshift shacks, made from all manner of wood and cardboard.
The only space between them is a narrow corridor that runs across the hall. TVs and music can be heard blaring from some units, and many doors are secured with metal chains.
In Ngcongo’s shack, a DA sticker adorns the small fridge in his tiny kitchen area.
His double bed fills his entire bedroom, and in the adjoining room, another double bed is shared by his 23- and 18year-old sons.
The wires of illegal electrical connections crisscross above these temporary structures on every floor.
The building is a haphazard maze of fire hazards. Just last week, the residents fought a small blaze.
Ngcongo is concerned about what will happen if there’s a more serious fire. The emergency exit near the kitchen is filled with water and other rubbish.
“If there’s a fire in the building we won’t be able to get out,” he says.
Fire hoses on the various floors hang impotently from the walls. No water runs into them.
The fire extinguishers have been stolen so regularly that those left over have been locked in a room.
Ngcongo blames the lax security guards for the fire which broke out on the third floor in May 2014, killing one person and destroying the possessions of Mkhize and about 60 others, leaving them homeless.
“What caused the fire, when we investigated, was a visitor smoking nyaope. For them not to burn a lot of matches, they burnt (the nyaope) off the candle. That’s where the fire started.
“They weren’t able to control it and ran away. We blamed security for that fire because (the culprits) were from outside.”
According to the Seri report, after the fire, consultations with the then MEC for human settlements, Jacob Mamabolo, fell through.
A building inspection by Joburg Emergency Management Services found that continued occupation in the building could lead to its collapse, and as a result of this, ward councillor Dan Bovu promised that all the Moth residents would be relocated to the Linatex building in Troyeville.
But residents were unhappy because the Linatex rules included daytime lockouts and strict gender segregation.
About 30 residents had moved to Linatex when the city halted the relocation after residents challenged the rules and refused to sign a lease agreement.
Despite that, many families had moved into Linatex when the city closed the relocation process again, saying there wasn’t enough space to accommodate any more residents.
The rest had to be housed in other parts of the Moth building.
“After the fire, we put people in passages and the toilets. The toilets were temporary, but now they’ve turned the toilets into their houses,” Ngcongo says.
Although refurbishments on the third floor were started, work was never finished and the floor is closed and bricked up.
As we walk around, the residents point out spots where people have been murdered, normally stabbed to death in drunken, drug-fuelled brawls.
They explain how one man’s neck was sliced over and over again until he died.
The murderer, a drug user, has allegedly moved back into the building after fleeing from the police.
Safety and security is a huge concern for the residents.
Kadende says she no longer cooks on the gas stoves in the communal kitchen on the ground floor because she is afraid to leave her nine-year-old daughter unsupervised in her second-floor room.
“You can’t leave the kids in your room when you go to the kitchen because of the risk. There are only curtains (separating us) and people are drinking. So we’re now cooking in our own shacks (on electric stoves).”
Another resident, Sipho Dlamini, says most of their headaches are caused by the lack of access control to the building.
In the past, registered residents would enter using a biometric system, and security guards controlled visitor access, but now the gate stands open at all hours and the security company seldom questions those going in and out.
“The gate causes all these problems,” says Dlamini.
“Criminals come here and vandalise and then go out. The gate is open for anybody, but there are people specifically registered to be here.
“People are noisy. Some people must wake up to go to work and school in the mornings. All the people who are officially registered here are very quiet.”
At one stage, a previous security company even asked for money or sex from strangers in exchange for allowing them to enter the building.
Members of this same company reportedly assisted in vandalising the building, ripping off taps and shower heads.
Some of the illegal occupants charged rent to people who were looking for a place to sleep.
“There’s corruption. No one has to pay anyone around here. This is a government property, this place is not for rental,” says Ngcongo.
The approximately 150 people who are entitled to live in the building are outnumbered by the illegal occupants.
At the last count, a census of sorts done by the committee revealed that about 900 people were living on the property.
“The illegal occupants make up almost 70 percent. They’re more than us. They can fight if we try to evict them. We raided the building about 10 times, (but then) we realised we’re putting our lives in danger because they become our enemies on the streets,” Ngcongo says.
They hope the metro police will conduct a raid on the building to get rid of the illegal occupants.
They also want answers from the council.
“We have managed this building for seven years. We’re moving the building forward and we don’t mind doing it, but it has been seven years now and we’re tired. We want peace of mind,” says Ngcongo.
“We were promised our RDP houses. We were there in court, the agreement was 12 months. The court asked the city, are you sure (the permanent accommodation) will be ready in 12 months? They said yes.”
An agitated Kadende interrupts: “We don’t want to be moved from shelter to shelter our whole lives.”
The residents have two requests for the municipality if it doesn’t move them to permanent accommodation as per the court settlement.
They want the building to be maintained and they want safe structures to live in within the Moth building.
“We’d like them to build partitions inside. We can then maintain our own house in our own room,” says Ngcongo.
The landing on which he is standing is commonly used as a tavern. While he talks, a man, high on drugs, leans against the opposite wall, staring into space.
A black-and-white photo of a smiling Nelson Mandela, fist in the air and glued to the graffiti-covered wall, looks over him.
“We’re still waiting for the promised land,” Ngcongo sighs.