Blood splatters and muffled cries greeted a Pietermaritzburg shack dweller who found a newborn baby boy in a makeshift pit latrine toilet last Friday.
A distraught Zinhle Mbanjwa, 31, said she was still haunted by the incident, which happened after the lights had gone off.
“I had just left a group of my neighbours to relieve myself and was left shocked. I then went back to the people I had been sitting with to inform them of what I had seen,” said Mbanjwa.
The tiny body of the infant was covered by a plastic bag.
The quick-thinking community members banded together to rescue the baby. She said the baby was later bundled into a car and taken to Northdale Hospital.
‘’What I saw on Friday was very traumatic. I do not know what would have gotten over the mother of the child to resort to that decision,” said Mbanjwa.
The newborn died at the hospital five hours after his arrival.
She said police should have been more determined in their pursuit of the mother, who is yet to be caught.
“From the onset authorities should have just raided the settlement,” said Mbanjwa.
She said so hot was the community’s rage that a few hours after the incident they flagged down a woman they suspected to be the culprit
But upon interrogation they found that she was not linked.
“We as a community could have done something different about this because no one can just die under our noses without us knowing,” she said.
Another community member who declined to reveal their name said most community members had an idea who the culprit was but were too fearful to report it to the authorities. “We are scared for our life. But I know that the woman was nowhere to be found. Even her family knows but would do nothing about it,” they said.
DA provincial leader Francois Rodgers, who visited the settlement on Wednesday, said they would write to MECs of social development Nonhlanhla Khoza and human settlements Sipho Nkosi about the incident.
“We learnt this was not the first incident in the community where a woman had disposed of a body,” said Rodgers.
The settlement is home to more than 2,000 shack dwellers, most of whom live in squalor.
“Basic living conditions are absolutely inhumane. These people have built their own toilets. Listening to the community, they tell me that when they go to the toilet the sewage pushes up against their buttocks. Their living conditions are worse than pigs’,” said Rodgers.
Ward councillor Edith Elliott said the settlement was hard for emergency services to access.
“Unfortunately it is not always easy for ambulances to venture inside the settlement. Most often they require patients to come to the road. The child needed oxygen and was bleeding profusely,” she said.
The infant is yet to be buried pending the outcome of a police investigation.
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