While eThekwini municipality say plans to relocate Durban families who have been living in Temporary Emergency Accommodation (TEA) since the April 2022 floods to permanent houses are closer to fruition, victims say seeing is believing.
eThekwini mayor Cyril Xaba said on Friday the city had identified several sites to accommodate all flood victims that were placed in temporary shelters.
“We are pleased to report the city has finalised this process and planning approvals have been granted for six sites ... The sites are shovel-ready for the province to commence with the building of permanent structures,” he said.
eThekwini was the most affected city in the devastating floods that engulfed the province, claiming the lives of more than 400 people, destroying hundreds of buildings and leaving thousands of people homeless.
After the floods, the residents who were left homeless were moved to 110 mass care centres, and those who could not rebuild were later relocated by the municipality and the department of human settlements to “more family-friendly accommodations” in the city , before Christmas of that year.
Xaba said the six sites are in Reservoir Hills, Klaarwater, Burlington Heights, Umkhomazi and two in Shallcross.
He said the city was confident these sites would be able to accommodate all the flood victims from the temporary sites, he said.
The residents will still be housed in their current accommodations for some time until the city completes building these structures.
However, Xaba confirmed to TimesLIVE Premium the lease agreements with the building owners who house the displaced families are expiring at the end of this month, as they had signed a two-year contract between October 2022 and October 2024.
He said the city is responsible for five contracts covering six facilities housing the families, while the department of housing is responsible for two contracts for two facilities.
Xaba is scheduled to meet Siboniso Duma, the provincial transport and human settlement MEC and Mmamoloko Kubayi, the national minister for human settlements, to discuss the lease of these facilities.
“We need to sit around the table as the three spheres of government — the local, provincial and national — to determine a way forward in terms of the expiring contracts,” he said.
“So we are looking at reprioritising our budget so that we can then extend the contracts as it were until new money is found during either adjustment or the budget process.”
Residents still living in the TEAs said they were cautiously optimistic.
Philani Mshengu, who is based in Mariannwood, Pinetown, said: “I hope they are not getting our hopes up for nothing because we were also told the same thing about getting sites even when Nomusa Dube-Ncube was the premier, but it never materialised.”
He said they would find it easier to believe if the city was to take at least two people from the committees in the TEAs to see the sites and relay it back to them.
Xoliswa Tshazi from Astra in Durban Central echoed those sentiments, saying the municipality has been saying they had “identified” sites from the time they were in community halls.
She said they have little to no communication with the municipality or the department of human settlements now.
Tshazi said they had previously proposed to the municipality the unemployed among them would be given a chance to do manual labour jobs at those sites, but they haven’t heard anything about that.
They also raised concerns that the landlords have been telling them that the municipality has not paid the rent, and in Mariannwood the electricity was cut off, but later reconnected.
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