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It is estimated that more than 500 houses were destroyed by fire and fueled by strong winds in Masiphumelele on December 17, 2020 in Cape Town, South Africa. Helicopters and fire trucks were deployed to help put out the fires and the cause of the fire is not yet known. (Photo by Gallo Images / Brenton Geach)
The Masiphumelele fire and the informal settlements of Cape Town: let’s put things in perspective.
Dear Major Dan Plato,
On Thursday, December 17, 2020, a devastating fire swept through an informal settlement in Masiphumelele, destroying more than 1,000 homes and leaving more than 5,000 people displaced and homeless.
This is not the first, second, third or even tenth time that such a fire has devastated families in Masiphumelele and left them with nothing. A Google search for Masiphumelele fires will provide endless results for news reports of such fires for each year up to 2010, and surely there have been others before then. He was also mayor for some time between 2009 and 2011, and we are still here. In some of these years there were two or more fires. Many lives have been lost as a result of these fires. This is just Masiphumelele we are talking about.
Cape Town has more than 200 informal settlements like Masiphumelele, without adequate or non-existent basic services. These fires happen. Cape Town politicians, you, and officials will visit these communities, solicit donations, tell stories about the causes of the fire, spread blame, and make excuses as to why the particular informal settlement has not received services, has not been improved or has not been improved. has received houses.
Mr. Mayor, in the same week that the recent Masiphumelele fire occurred, there were two other informal settlement fires at Site C Khayelitsha that destroyed more than 40 houses, leaving more than 200 displaced people and one person dead. These are just fires that we are aware of during this week of December 2020. There are likely others.
At the beginning of the same week a statement It was issued by the member of the Committee of the City Mayor’s Office (Mayco) for Human Settlements, Malusi Booi. In the statement, the Mayco member said Cape Town City will no longer provide emergency construction kits to those affected by fires and floods and blamed this on budget cuts from the national government.
After the Masiphumelele fire he visited the community. They also visited other Cape Town politicians, such as Malusi Booi, Felicity Purchase and city officials. You all joined the call for donations of the public. Mr. Mayor you later Announced that the fire was probably caused by “an attempted land invasion.” Then there was a visit from the Minister of the National Department of Human Settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu, accompanied by Malusi Booi. Promises of “durable solutions” were made. All the scenes we’ve seen before.
So why does the city of Cape Town respond in the same way, year after year, as if it were a humanitarian organization, when fires and other disasters occur in informal settlements? Do politicians and city officials expect a different result each year without doing anything different? Isn’t that how insanity is defined?
Mr. Mayor, it has been a week since the recent Masiphumelele fire. More than 5,000 people remain homeless, destitute and likely to be for the next time. All of this is happening at a time when the country is experiencing a second wave of Covid-19 and a new variant of the virus that spreads faster. “Stay home” is still the message.
“Housing has become the front line defense against the coronavirus. Home has rarely been more of a life and death situation. “This was the message of Leilani Farha, Fthe United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, in March of this year when she urged governments to take urgent action to protect people in informal settlements against Covid-19.
In Cape Town, for many, living in an informal settlement is and has been a matter of life and death for a long time. This is not due to natural disasters, but to his government’s anti-black and anti-poor policies and failures in the provision of services. Whether due to lack of access to safe and dignified sanitation, lack of adequate lighting, lack of adequate access to water, or whether it is fires and floods, lives have been lost and remain at risk in informal settlements.
We know the excuses and lies you and the City will tell in defending your failures. It will claim that it is the best managed or better than other municipalities, it will claim the lack of available funds and the lack of land available for housing, it will claim ‘long and complex community participation’ processes and it will buy from the communities as a problem, and it will claim that it is doing everything in your power to deal with these complex situations. But Mr. Mayor, we all know better, these excuses and lies must end.
Reports such as I Want to Know titled City Leases: Cape Town’s Failure to Redistribute Land show us there is land available in Cape Town. The report shows, for example, that public land in Rondebosch equivalent to 45 rugby fields has been leased for just under R1,000.00 a year for the rich and whites to enjoy golfing, but cannot be prioritized to house thousands of people in need.
Budget analysis recently published by International Budget Partnership South Africa, through its collaborative initiative Let’s protect each other, shows that the city of Cape Town has a cumulative surplus of more than R5 billion. Money that could be used to provide much needed services in many of Cape Town’s informal settlements. There have also been numerous reports that Cape Town City had to repay some of the money received through grants from the national government due to under-utilization. This is a city with a housing crisis that doesn’t spend money on housing.
Therefore, the City has well-located land and money available that could be used for housing and that could be used to re-block or de-densify informal settlements in order to provide basic services, access roads, and limit the amount of fires or damage caused. By fires. , but choose not to. But all continue to fail to comply with their constitutional obligations. You and the City have failed the people of Masiphumelele, the people of Site C, and many others in informal settlements in Cape Town.
The point is that these failures are due to a lack of political will. Lack of political will which we believe is shaped by your government’s anti-black policies and attitudes, also influenced by illusions in some politicians in Cape Town that blacks in informal settlements will live in squalor, be miserable and eventually leave this city, refugees’ and all.
This attitude of Cape Town must change. Make it better, Mr. Mayor.
–
Axolile Notywala – Member of Khayelitsha CAN and 2020 Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity (AFRE)
Sindisa Monakali – Member of Khayelitsha CAN and Vice President of Equal Education (EE)
Thozama Dyum – Member of the CAN of Khayelitsha and community leader in the informal settlement of the island in Khayelitsha
Zacharia Mashele – Member of Khayelitsha CAN and I Want to Know Media and Communications Officer
Khayelitsha CAN is one of the Community Action Networks in Cape Town made up of a group of volunteers based in Khayelitsha responding to the needs of disadvantaged people and communities, especially informal settlements, during the COVID19 era.
