“Why would you need a commission of inquiry into the Marshalltown fire?” asks Herman Mashaba, the former mayor of Joburg, after at least 77 people died last week in an entirely preventable blaze that swept through one of the city’s most notorious buildings.
“Notorious” because this five-storey building at 80 Albert Street has been synonymous with misery since it opened in 1954 as the Central Pass Office. A blue city heritage plaque explains that it “was an infamous checkpoint of the influx control system under apartheid. The ‘Dompas’, which controlled the movement of African people, was issued here.”
After last week, it’s now also a symbol of gross failure by the democratic government to deliver on its constitutional promise — a heritage building abandoned by the state and hijacked by thugs, who charged hundreds of people up to R2,000 for space in one of the 80-odd shacks in that building.
Mashaba’s question is aimed at Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi, who has now announced an inquiry into “the prevalence of hijacked buildings, what caused the deadly blaze, and who must bear responsibility”.
Lesufi’s announcement teemed with the predictable feints you’d expect from a political can-kicking exercise: a “retired judge” to chair the inquiry (Sisi Khampepe); an assurance that the judge would “report back” (but to Lesufi, not the public who pay his salary); and impotent hand-wringing about how “stolen buildings are becoming a crisis”.
None of this is new. We know exactly why this happened, so to pretend this is the first time anyone is hearing about it is a lie
— Herman Mashaba
“None of this is new,” says Mashaba. “We know exactly why this happened, so to pretend this is the first time anyone is hearing about it is a lie.”
The fate of this building, like many in Joburg’s inner city, has been predictable for anyone who bothered to look. After 1994, the government leased it to the Usindiso Ministries Women’s Shelter. In 2013, the lease ended and criminals “hijacked” the building, and began charging people who lived there.
What happened last week, given the history, seemed inevitable.
At 1am on Thursday, a fire broke out on the ground floor, snaked up the stairs and consumed the jerry-rigged cardboard and cloth partitions. Some blamed a candle. Because of the way the shacks were constructed, and the fact that the security gates were locked, many couldn’t escape. Of the estimated 600 residents, 77 died — an astoundingly high toll.
Brian McKechnie, heritage architect and inner-city property owner, says the risk of just such a fire had been evident for years.
“As soon as you have people living in buildings not designed for it, you have makeshift electricity connections and people using fires to cook and keep warm. And with just a small curtain separating where they sleep, the chances of a fire are extremely high,” he says.
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This building was owned by the Johannesburg Property Co (JPC), a controversial arm of the city that owns 200 properties, and which has been embroiled in corruption allegations for years.
Says McKechnie: “Many of the JPC’s buildings, like the [former] pass office, are illegally occupied and in bad condition. Yet the organisation often doesn’t seem to care.”
Nor do the politicians, whose only goal seemed to be to cover their backs.
Joburg city speaker Colleen Makhubele blamed nonprofit organisations that had taken the city to court to stop it evicting people from hijacked buildings. “If they do not catch a wake-up now, they are looking for the whole city to collapse in the name of fighting for human rights,” she said.
It was a cynical way of dodging accountability, but in line with equally dishonest claims by her peers. Lindiwe Zulu, minister of social development, said: “This is the result of apartheid that kept people apart in these conditions, and we are expected to change these conditions in 30 years.”
Zakes Mda, the award-winning novelist, mocked these flimsy excuses on social media. “In the 30 years of our rule, we didn’t have any power to do anything. Apartheid continues to this day, and it is so powerful over us that all we can do is sit there in a catatonic position. Instead of reversing its evil machinations, we took care of our bank balances (even in our stupor).”
One inspection report from December 20 2017 says the building is ‘totally neglected’ and must be fixed because there are ‘children kept with mothers on [these] premises’ — a recipe for an outbreak of disease
Red flags ignored
The bogus claim that this tragedy couldn’t have been foreseen is exposed thanks to numerous council documents obtained by the FM, which detail how officials inspected the building five times between 2014 and 2017, flagging serious concerns.
One inspection report from December 20 2017 says the building is “totally neglected”, and must be fixed because there are “children kept with mothers on [these] premises” — a recipe for an outbreak of disease.
Another, on June 5 2018, including photos of burnt electrical sockets and a leaking ceiling, argues that the Joburg Metro Police must “attend urgently to the hijacked building”.
It says “alternative means for accommodation will have to be provided for all occupants” while the building is rehabilitated, as the city has a “legal obligation to ensure a safe and healthy environment”.
Finally, on January 30 2019, Joburg’s health department, then run by Mpho Phalatse, submitted a report to the city council, arguing that the clinic on the premises had to be shut, as it was “unacceptable” to operate it in a building ruined by “ongoing structural decay”.
Her report details the “rapid deterioration of this illegally occupied building”, including that “the emergency fire systems have been damaged/destroyed”, and “there are illegal water and electricity connections”.
It adds: “The JPC, together with the [police], need to take control of the building and seal it off until further funds are available to repair and restore the old infrastructure at 80 Albert Street.”
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At the time, Phalatse said closing the clinic was the “right thing” to do. And, evidently spooked, the council immediately did. The JPC and police, however, took no action.
Two years later, in 2021, Phalatse was elected DA mayor of Joburg, and began investigating the JPC. Helen Botes, the JPC’s boss, was soon suspended, after the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) uncovered shady deals, including an R18m Covid “deep cleaning” contract.
But after Phalatse was forced to resign finally in January this year, the new ANC-led administration swiftly reinstated Botes, and put that corruption probe on ice.
Speaking to the FM this week, Phalatse says: “We’re tiptoeing around the real problem, which is the rot inside the JPC. Until that’s fixed, you’re not going to fix the problems at these city buildings.”
Nor does she see any point to Lesufi’s inquiry, as “there’s adequate information on record already”.
Mashaba is even more outspoken. “What has Lesufi ever given us, besides dividing people on racial lines?” he asks. “What will this commission tell us? It’s clear as daylight what happened — the problem is, no-one wants to deal with it.”
Many, of course, will point out that Mashaba himself was the mayor of Joburg between 2016 and 2019. Shouldn’t he have done more?
“We did act,” he says. “When I was there, we identified 600 buildings which had been hijacked in the inner city, and launched a project to reclaim them.”
Mashaba says criminal cases were lodged with the police, and plans developed to build 14,000 affordable housing units. But after he was elbowed out as mayor in 2019, the multiagency team he’d set up to do this was disbanded. “City officials were told in no uncertain terms to drop the ‘Mashaba project’,” he says.
We’re tiptoeing around the real problem, which is the rot inside the JPC
— Mpho Phalatse
A city left to die
Nobody knows whether these measures would have pre-empted the tragedy, but what is clear is that Joburg’s inner city has been left to die by those with political responsibility to ensure this doesn’t happen.
“The failure to revive Joburg’s CBD, with all its potential, is one of the great failures of post-apartheid South Africa,” says Carel Kleynhans, the CEO of Divercity, one of the largest investors in the area over the past decade.
Divercity invested R2bn in building precincts such as Jewel City near Maboneng, which spans six blocks east of the CBD and includes 1,200 apartments, as well as the 30-storey Towers Main, 10,000m2 of which is leased to Absa.
“Countries that emerged from poverty, like China, did so because they rapidly urbanised and densified their cities. We missed this beat in Joburg. And it’s almost entirely due to local government failure,” he says.
Kleynhans says it became a vicious circle: the more the government retreated from the inner city, the more decay crept in. For many owners, it became economically rational to abandon their buildings, rather than pay for extra security and services.
“If you look at the skyline of Joburg, about 80% of the buildings taller than five storeys are empty, many abandoned. In some, hijackers provide some basic services and they’re not unsafe; in others, the legal owners still collect rent, but these buildings have become deathtraps,” he says.
Though Divercity has put billions into the city, it’s unclear how long this will continue. Kleynhans says: “It’s not working any more. In the absence of any real intent by government to fix this, it’s not economically rational to invest more.”
Lesufi’s commission probably won’t change that.
Says McKechnie: “What you have in many of these hijacked buildings is a giant tinder box. But the city has shown little interest in managing these properties, even though it’s clear it’s getting worse.”
Instead, it embarked on a rash of vanity projects, which did nothing for residents. “People didn’t choose to live in such terrible conditions, they’re desperate. The city failed them, and the city is continuing to fail them,” he says.
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