By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
City of Johannesburg mayor Kabelo Gwamanda announced plans to resettle about 150 residents displaced by a fire disaster that destroyed a two-story building on Sunday morning.
Sunday’s fire occurred less than six months after an inferno claimed the lives of 77 people in the Marshalltown area of the city.
Gwamanda and city municipal manager Clint Brink visited the site on Monday.
The fire killed at least two people and wounded several others.
The woman accused of starting the fire has been arrested and she is expected to appear in court.
“We are currently working on relocating them to temporary emergency accommodation. But that will have to be done in collaboration with the national government. They will have to assist us financially in terms of the facilities that we need to allocate,” said Gwamanda.
Some of the victims are said to be foreign nationals. Gwamanda said the City is working with embassies of different countries to assist.
“The process that we are currently undertaking is in collaboration with the embassies. We have been alerted to the fact that we have 28 Lesotho foreign nationals, 4 Tanzanians, and 2 that come from Zimbabwe. We would first like to work with the embassies to establish their identities and what assistance they can render.”
Gwamanda added that no one would be able to access the building as of Monday, after a report declaring the building unsafe for occupation.
“The building will be condemned by this afternoon. We got a structural engineer’s report that already indicated to us that the building is not structurally safe. We will close it and no one will be able to access this particular building,” he said.
“Bad and hijacked buildings are an issue for us as the City. We are looking at options on how we will address this, on how to refurbish, rehabilitate and repurpose them, not only individual buildings, but we will be looking at them block per block. This will all form part of our inner city rejuvenation programme.”
According to Brink, a man claiming to be the owner of the building which burnt had tried to evict the occupants, resulting in a court dispute. The court order was not granted “because of the lack of evidence as [the man] was not able to prove that he is the actual owner of the building”.
Brink said the city was finding ways to deal with the problem of hijacked buildings.
“We have started a specific conversation and discussions with the Public Investment Corporation — a state-owned organ — to address the issue of bad buildings, so we aim to have a long-term and sustainable approach in addressing these particular bad buildings,” he said.