Nelson Khathani opens the door to his inner-city apartment in the San Jose building in Berea, Johannesburg. The outside corridors are murky and putrid, and the stench of urine and sewage lingers in the air.
Khathani (54) is tall, with a warm friendly face. Flashing a welcoming smile, his eyes sparkle, even in the dull gloom of the sparsely furnished apartment. He doesn’t mention the smell outside.
The small space is neat and mostly bare. Through a doorway on the right, the kitchen’s floor is lined with 20-litre buckets filled with water — his supply for the following day. There is a paraffin stove on which he cooks, as the building has no electricity.
In the 1970s, Khathani moved from King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape to make a better life for himself in Johannesburg. For a while, he did well working for a scrap-metal company, but when it closed down in the 1990s, he found himself unemployed and unable to afford his rent.
”Then I met the owner of this place, whom I knew; we were friends,” Khathani says, pointing to his second-floor apartment in this once-thriving sectional-title building. ”He said, ‘I’ve got a place in the city centre, but it’s dark and there is no water.’ — I came to see the place and I said, ‘OK,”’ Khathani says, recalling his first visit to San Jose.
In 2000, when he moved in, the building was already abandoned by its original owners, who had fled to the suburbs. Today, rubbish heaps and sewage breed malodours that flow through the building’s 16 floors. Only the city’s ultra-poor still reside here — those desperate enough to live without water, electricity and sanitation.
Life without amenities
Residents have become so accustomed to living without basic amenities that they hardly ever complain. Doreen Maduna (42) says she walks for almost an hour each morning to get to a council tap in Doornfontein for the water required to sustain her nine-member household. ”I fetch about six 20-litre buckets of water every day,” she says.
Even so, cooking, washing and using the toilet remains difficult. Because there is no piped water, San Jose has an ineffective waste-disposal system. Toilets don’t flush, causing sewage to get trapped in the pipes. It often overflows, adding to the stench.
Because of its moribund state and the lack of proper sanitation, the city council deems San Jose a health hazard. It is on the city’s list of ”bad” buildings and has been earmarked for rejuvenation through its Better Buildings Programme (BBP).
Before such buildings can be renovated, their inhabitants first have to be evicted. This is problematic for those who need to stay in the city centre for their livelihoods but cannot afford other accommodation. Even inner-city social housing schemes charge at least R700 a person per month.
Khathani sells clothes in Berea and Yeoville, work that earns him about R350 a month. It does not always provide a steady income, he says. ”Like now, I’m broke; I eated [sic] all the money — there is no money to get stock; now I have to sell sweets.”
Maduna, who moved into San Jose from Ladysmith two years ago, sews, sells pillows and does ”piece-jobs” to earn extra money. She is the only breadwinner in her household. On an income of less than R400 a month, this is one of the only inner-city homes her family can afford.
Court order
The Johannesburg High Court last year eased the burden on people like Khathani and Maduna when it ordered that the city could not evict even illegal tenants from inner-city buildings unless it found suitable alternative accommodation for them in the city centre.
However, this has significantly slowed down projects like the BBP, one city official who did not want to be identified told the Mail & Guardian Online in January. The city does not have adequate resources to provide inner-city housing for so many people free of charge, the official said.
The city is appealing the court order on February 20 in the Supreme Court of Appeal. If it wins, Khathani, Maduna and others like them might all be evicted.
Stuart Wilson, of the Centre of Applied Legal Studies (Cals) at the University of the Witwatersrand, has been helping the residents of San Jose fight for their right to remain in the inner city. He says the city can afford to accommodate these people, but it lacks the will to do so.
”Instead of [the city saying], ‘This is how these people live; how can we intervene successfully to secure their livelihoods?’ — the question asked is, ‘How can we make our plans justifiable?”’ he says.
Families divided
A few blocks from San Jose, in the shadow of the landmark Ponte building, the houses on Joel Street are in a similar predicament. Derelict and abandoned by their owners, the inhabitants also face eviction. At least they have water and electricity — connected illegally, residents say, although they are not sure by whom.
In one house, the Dlaminis, a family of six, live in a single crumbling room. A double bed stands in one corner and a primus stove in another; clothes hang on racks to one side. Father and husband Isaac Dlamini says they survive on a state disability grant. Pointing out packets and bottles in a corner, he says they also sell muti to make extra money.
Appended to the main houses is a series of corrugated iron shacks, each one inhabited by a different family. Angie Nedali (52) shares one such shack with a friend. A mother of two, she came from Limpopo in 1999, but still hasn’t found full-time employment. Her children are in Germiston, as she cannot afford to have them live with her in the city.
Bheki Sithole (40) lives in the shack next to Nedali’s. His four children stay in KwaZulu-Natal with their mother. Every month, he sends them R600 of his R820 state disability grant. ”I try to make money with the leftover R200,” he says, explaining that he has to sell things on the street. ”But there is no business.”
He would like to have his family closer to him, ”but I can’t move them because it will cost me lots of money — I have four children, I can’t manage.”
Sithole says government officials try to evict him from his home and stop him from doing business. ”The government takes my stuff, always takes my stuff — I have no money now. They never help us.”
Migrant labour
Cals’s Wilson says that because many ultra-poor inner-city residents can’t support their entire households in Johannesburg, families are torn apart when one person leaves to work in the city, sending money home but hardly ever visiting because it is too expensive.
Likening the situation to the apartheid era’s migrant labour system, he says the city sees these people as temporary residents with a base somewhere else, and is therefore reluctant to provide proper facilities for them. ”That is what used to happen under apartheid [and] it is still a feature of South Africa — because people can’t afford to consolidate their households in urban areas.â€
He feels there should be better assistance from the state — instead of helping, it is interfering to make these people’s lives more difficult, he says. ‘The government makes lots of nice noises — [but the] policy and practice is not there.â€
The Johannesburg city official, however, said the city’s policy is to incorporate the urban poor into the community in a way that is mutually beneficial. ”There is a formally mandated council strategy to try to transform the city in a way that the poor don’t have to go anywhere else,†the official said, adding that improvements can’t ”happen overnight”
However, as Wilson says: ”If you are evicted from your home, you need an overnight solution.”