To fully understand the horrific deaths of the 77 people living in a filthy, crime-infested, hijacked building in central Johannesburg last Wednesday, you must understand the death of this one child first.
On Sunday, August 27, 10-year-old Simphiwe Tshepo Moloi was playing football with his friends in a field outside his home in Soweto. Their ball rolled into a hole on a Johannesburg Water contractor’s site next to their playfield. The hole was filled with water. The boy walked into the hole to retrieve the ball, but it was far deeper than he had anticipated. He could not swim. He drowned. The Sowetan newspaper reported that his body was retrieved by divers five hours later.
Moloi was buried on Saturday. His family, who had struggled to put together funds to organise his funeral, received “an undertaker and funeral package” paid for by the contractors responsible for the hole the boy had drowned in, according to the Daily Sun newspaper.
In the week after he died, the local councillor brought groceries to the Moloi family home. Joburg Water brought groceries. The contractor brought groceries. It’s all very sweet, isn’t it? But Simphiwe should not have died, and no-one seems to be asking this simple question: “How is it that a construction site that has a massive hole, in a residential area, could be accessed easily by a child?”
Construction work is subject to safety rules. If the safety officer responsible for that construction had checked, they would have immediately pointed out that a hole that could fill up with so much water, that it can drown a 10-year-old, should not have been left open. The job should have been concluded and the hole filled while there was supervision of the process.
Now Simphiwe, described as a sweet child by his schoolmates, is dead and gone because a simple safety rule was broken. Will the municipality bring charges of homicide, or at the very least negligence, against those responsible for his death? This poor boy’s life does not matter to the powers-that-be, so don’t expect anything meaningful to happen.
Our elected leaders cannot make a systemic difference when a 10-year-old dies in a ditch. They can’t make a difference when 77 people burn to death in a hijacked building.
What does this one boy’s death have to do with the horrific deaths of 77 people in a building fire last Thursday? Well, everything starts with one safety rule that we don’t implement and enforce, and with a death that we don’t care about and that we don’t learn from. When we don’t take action to stop gangsters from hijacking buildings, other criminals feel emboldened to do the same. When we normalise that people are living in filth, in darkness, in buildings that have shacks inside and on their roofs, then we open the door for more of the same. It started with one building being hijacked, when officials turned a blind eye, and this is how it ends — with 77 bodies on fire.
The reason there will be another fire at yet another hijacked building in Joburg is because the phenomenon of people living in filthy hijacked buildings is now part of the culture of governance in the city. Buildings and houses get hijacked, get used as drug and crime dens, and the authorities don’t act. The Joburg city centre is a lawless hellscape.
One of the first stories I wrote as a young reporter in the 1990s was about a fire in a hijacked house in Bertrams, Joburg. There were between 60 and 80 people living in a seven-room space. At least 20 people were dead when I visited the place the morning after the fire. The practice of hijacked houses, or landlords packing hundreds of people into apartments divided up into bed spaces, was so prevalent in Johannesburg that popular 2008 movie Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema had a whole storyline about it. This weekend Reuters reported that Angela Rivers, GM at the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association, said she knew of 57 hijacked buildings in the central business district alone. If you fan out to areas like Jeppe, Berea, Hillbrow, Yeoville, Randburg and others, you have more than 200 hijacked. Then add the hundreds of hijacked houses.
President Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday described it as a “multilayered” problem. He is right. The politicians have been blaming NGOs as if they do not have the power to use the law to change things. The municipal officials sit on their hands because they know that their political principals do not care. The police are taking bribes from the hijackers. The system is unable to solve multilayered problems. Even after the parade of politicians at the scene this week, there will be another fire like this one, and there will be deaths, and there will be yet another procession of politicians arranging funerals and giving speeches.
Our elected leaders cannot make a systemic difference when a 10-year-old dies in a ditch. They can’t make a difference when 77 people burn to death in a hijacked building.
Our leaders are exhausted and incapable of governing. We need new ones.
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