WATCH | Protea Glen developer to be investigated for building flood-prone homes on Soweto wetland

As rain continues to fall, Soweto residents are still picking up the pieces after destructive rain that caused floods around Gauteng over the weekend.

Nomzamo Sebone, a mother of four, recently completed renovating her home but has now lost everything. Wearing her teenage son’s clothes, she told TimesLIVE this is not the first time the area has been affected by floods. However, Friday’s rain was “the worst [she’d] ever experienced, coming in at almost chest-high levels”.

“Whenever it rains, we start panicking and I’m defeated,” she said.

The only solution, according to Sebone, to beat the current and possible future floods is relocation. “We need the government to remove us from this area because clearly, this is not a residential area.”

As she carried her children to safety, the water level reached her hips. “Everything happened in less than 30 minutes. We can’t sleep, we lost all the food, we are traumatised as it’s still raining and we don’t know what will happen,” she said.

“I blame them [the agents] for not disclosing that this is what you’ll go through because it’s not far from the stream — we’ll have this problem forever.”

Human settlements minister Mmamoloko Kubayi agreed with Sebone’s sentiments. The minister and her delegation visited several areas affected by the recent downpour in Soweto on Monday. Standing on the road dividing houses affected by floods and wetlands, Kubayi said houses should never have been built there in the first place.

“There’s no stormwater drainage anywhere in this street. It doesn’t meet the minimum requirements of a town that should have been developed. We will have to relocate these people,” she said.

The City of Johannesburg will now probe how the unknown developer was able to obtain approval to build more than 100 houses in the area. Kubayi said the developer would have to be held accountable for the relocation of residents because they made profits from sales.

Samuel Sedibane, who moved to the area in 2019, said the dishonesty of property agents has caused a lot of harm. He described the ordeal as a nightmare.

TimesLIVE

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