The greatest takeaway from Monday’s tragic Johannesburg building collapse that claimed nine lives is that our darkest moments are typically met with political rhetoric, grandstanding and hardly any action or follow-through.
While the immediate blame for the tragedy lies with the owners and developers of the two-storey building at Amethyst Business Park in Ormonde, southern Johannesburg, our collective lack of accountability with a sliding scale of responsibility ranging from ratepayer to ultimately government should be a factor.
According to preliminary reports, the concrete slab dividing the structure into two storeys caved in and collapsed, leading to structural failure.
The heroes of this tragedy are without a doubt emergency services who for two days rose to the challenge in dealing with a horrific disaster caused in the main by our “not my problem” mentality brokered by years of burnout and apathy.
This tunnel vision is spectacularly at play in incidents of domestic and sexual abuse as well as gender-based violence.
Residents in the southern suburb driving past the construction would no doubt have been more worried about potholes, traffic and the water crisis than concerning themselves about yet another building.
Neighbours would have been bogged down by the noise, dust and trucks parked in the area instead of alerting a councillor to see whether the construction had ticked all the boxes on the construction check list. This could have sparked a visit from a building inspector and averted certain tragedy.
But none of that happened, according to Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero’s telling sound bite. “We should have probably picked up that these people are building where they should not build,” he stated when he visited the Ormonde building collapse.
Morero said the city had no record of building plans being submitted for the construction and the justification is that the city had weaknesses in its development planning department due to a lack of sufficient resources — only 15 inspectors — to conduct inspections.
Cue the rhetoric: Morero has undertaken to work with the city manager, MMC for development planning and the deputy mayor and to meet the building inspectors to discuss these issues, and they will approach the courts regarding plans to demolish the structure.
The exact same scenario played out in December after the collapse of a double-storey building in Doornkop, Johannesburg, which claimed the lives of three people and left three others injured. Public works and infrastructure minister Dean Macpherson launched a full investigation.
And two weeks earlier, eThekwini municipality said preliminary reports confirmed there were no building plans approved for construction of a four-storey temple that collapsed in Redcliffe, north of Durban, killing five people. The municipality planned to hand the matter over to the department of employment and labour and said it would assist relevant authorities in the investigation.
In April 2025 human settlements minister Thembi Simelane presented the National Home Builders Registration Council’s (NHBRC’s) final report into the George building collapse on May 6 2024.
The gist of the report: negligence and misconduct were the chief culprits that led to the historic disaster that claimed 34 lives.
Her words, “as a caring government, we want to promise the families and friends of the departed workers, who got befallen by this tragic incident during that fateful day in the hands of negligence which could have been avoided, that their lives are not in vain,” ring hollow.
The report goes into details about President Cyril Ramaphosa’s signing of the Housing Consumer Protection Act (Act No. 25 of 2024) with “significant“ changes to the legislative framework governing the country’s home-building industry.
It highlighted a greater platform for whistle-blowing and stiffer punitive measures — an administrative fine up to R1m compared with the previous R25,000 slap on the wrist.
Simelane noted, however, the law only works when it’s enforced and that a collective effort is needed from all stakeholders in the building environment to effectively enforce the recently assented to Housing Consumer Protection Act.
There are pockets of resistance to the lawless status quo.
Last Friday, 65 undocumented migrants and their employers were arrested during a labour inspection in Clayville. The list of contraventions included:
- construction workers without personal protective equipment;
- unsafe scaffolding;
- failure to pay the national minimum wage;
- no UIF;
- no Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act (Coida) registration; and
- a fake construction permit.
The blitz operation on Friday, led by deputy minister of employment and labour Jomo Sibiya and Ekurhuleni mayor Nkosindiphile Xhakaza, targeted two construction sites in Clayville Extensions 80 and 8 — where inspectors identified multiple breaches of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) regulations and remuneration practices.
The operation is just one way of flexing government muscle and needs to be a constant thorn in flesh in the sides of errant and opportunistic businesses and entrepreneurs.
The lives of the George, Verulam and Doornkop victims will not be in vain if the public hold government accountable by asking questions and ensuring government squares up to its mandate.
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