Hostel thugs petrol bomb room
Traditional healer unharmed
GLEBELANDS hostel traditional healer, Thembelani Shozi, under attack for refusing to pay protection money, had his room petrol bombed and all his belongings destroyed on Friday night.
Shozi was targeted because he refused to pay illegal landlords a monthly fee of R50 for his room. This is money over and above the legal rent all hostel dwellers have to pay to eThekwini Municipality.
Shozi was featured in a Daily News article about lawlessness in the hostel two weeks ago.
He had already survived five attempts on his life, and in one of those attacks, a client he was treating was shot dead.
On Friday he was attending to a family near uMlazi when he received a call to tell him his place had been broken into and the gang had thrown his belongings out the window and set his room alight.
Community activist, Vanessa Burger, said the traditional healer was in a bad way psychologically because some of the muti destroyed was collected from Mozambique and Malawi and was extremely valuable.
She said police escorted Shozi to the hostel to recover what he could.
Last night attempts to get hold of Shozi were unsuccessful. His cousin, who identified herself only as Ntokozo, said he was not taking calls.
“He doesn’t want to make contact with people. He has moved out of the room and is safe where he is. I’m sure he will talk when he is ready,” she said.
Burger said the thugs, from Block 52 in the hostel, were well-known to residents, human rights defenders, the media and the police.
“Since April 12 they have been hunting Shozi, shooting at him inside his building, following him and firing at the public transport in which he has been travelling, with no regard for the lives of innocent bystanders.”
She said on Friday the thugs had arrived during a power outage. While firing blindly in the darkness inside the building, they apparently mistook his room and set alight the door of a neighbour’s home, terrifying children who were asleep inside.
“The police were called, but they refused to enter the building without back-up. Shozi had by then joined them. While standing outside Block 42, at least five more shots were heard inside the building,” Burger said.
Police spokesman, Major Thulani Zwane, said he was not aware of the incident.
HUMAN Settlements Minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, has made a bold declaration that the government will abolish hostels, one of the legacies of the apartheid government.
Sisulu said it was an insult that South Africa still had hostel dwellings, which previously contributed to the breakdown of families in black communities.
In provinces like KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, hostels also represent a painful chapter of the country’s history because they were the areas where black-on-black violence was rife in the mid’80s to early ’90s.
While there have been post-democracy incidents of political violence at hostels, they have mainly been at hotspots where general crime, such as plots of taxi violence murders, political violence and faction fights, are masterminded.
In some areas, conversion of hostel dwellings, which were formerly reserved for occupation by men only, into family residential units has begun.
We applaud Sisulu and the government for embarking on this project because not only will it mean families will live together, but it will also restore the dignity of its occupants.
Besides the fact that most of the current hostel structures are dilapidated, the majority of them were also not properly built to adequately accommodate human beings. The rooms are too small and ablution facilities are communal and offer no privacy, which is not ideal when women and children find themselves there.
Having properly built family units should also boost efforts to fight crime and it is hoped the beneficiaries of this initiative will help the government to root out the criminal elements at hostels.
Occupants will also have to play their part in helping to look after the renovated units.
Converting hostels should also help to clear the housing backlog because they will offer an alternative to those people who do not necessarily wish to own a house in urban areas, but who want decent accommodation.
When Sisulu made the announcement, she also said there would be a review of the housing tender system, which is fraught with fraud and corruption.
We can only say “yay” to a decisive move by the government to end tender corruption in the construction sector.