Evidence wa ka Ngobeni
Residents of Johannesburg and its surrounding suburban flatlands are experiencing an invasion of massive rats and cockroaches thriving in the city’s warm conditions and because of a lack of a proper pest-control strategy.
The Johannesburg Metropolitan Council confirmed this week that the city of gold and suburbs of Yeoville, Jeppe, Berea and Hillbrow have been the hardest hit by the highest ever insurgence of rats and cockroaches.
The council fears that the pests may cause health problems. Rats are carriers of diseases and can cause alarming epidemics of dengue fever and the plague.
The Johannesburg Metropolitan Council say eliminating rats and cockroaches in the city has been an “uphill battle”. The council has abandoned fumigating storm-water drains for fear of poisoning residents and homeless people but creating ideal conditions for pests to multiply.
Council employees working in and around Johannesburg Park Station and Noord Street said they have seen “fat” cockroaches and rats as big as cats wandering on the pavements. Other council workers say there are unusually high numbers of cockroaches in the storm-water drains.
In the city centre businessmen are tormented by the rats. Manny Rocha, who owns the Hoek Street Take Away, says his company has lost thousands of rands over the last four years because of the rats. He says no matter how much pesticide he uses, he cannot get rid of them.
“They eat all my chicken stock. I use poison to kill them, but it seems they are not being reduced. Instead they come in numbers. I kill a small number of them but they just keep coming. The supermarket next door has had its huge stock of mealie meal eaten by the rats,” says Rocha.
The Universal Church, near Park Station, has also been plagued by rats. Lindiwe Zondi, manager of the church help centre, says their storerooms, kitchens and clinic that serves for the city’s homeless and poor have been invaded by “big” rats.
“Every morning when we open the doors of the clinic these big rats come running into the clinic in numbers and we just watch helplessly,” Zondi said. She fears that the rats could pass on diseases to the hundreds of homeless people they feed each day, because they constantly eat the food stored in the centre’s basement.
“Last week I gave the doctor at the clinic rat poison and the following morning we found dead rats all over the surgery. It’s bad, rats are not welcome in a medical place at all. We have fumigated the place but they keep coming,” she said. “The rats are going to kill us. It seems we are going to be replaced by the rats. They emerge mainly from the streets and they are so huge. We are scared of them.”
“You can cry if you can see what they do in the store room. They roam around like it’s some game.” Zondi says the church pays about R1 000 a month to pest control companies but the numbers of rats have not decreased.
The council says hawkers trading in the Johannesburg area are chiefly to blame for the situation. Johannesburg’s environmental manager Percy Naidoo said informal traders “throw things in the storm-water drains and sweep and leave garbage on street corners”. The council spends about R48-million a year on maintaining the drainage system and collecting rubbish.
“Before informal trading started here in the city, the council used to do fumigation in the stormwater drains and there were less problems,” said Johannesburg’s urban environment executive director Joel Masetle.
“The whole fumigation programme was halted as we realised that we nearly killed people in the process. Some people hide their things in there and street children use them as shelters”.
Masetle said the council will provide fumigation services to public property at the request of officials. But private property owners have to use pest control companies.
Matsele says the council is working on new strategies to inform informal traders about the dangers of throwing rubbish in the storm-water drains. They are also putting grills on storm-water drains to prevent people from throwing rubbish into them.
Caroline Crump of the University of Witwatersrand’s animal, plant and environmental sciences department says there are many factors that make rats multiply in Johannesburg.
“The city has good conditions for the rats. The rats thrive on warm conditions.” Crump said the situation was worsened by the high population in the area and the inadequate drainage system.