Hijacked buildings in the City of Johannesburg have been blamed for crime in many parts of the city.
ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has accused the MMC of Public Safety in the City of Johannesburg, Mgcini Tshwaku of negotiating with criminals.
This comes after Tshwaku told the media on Tuesday that he is willing to negotiate with residents of a hijacked building in the Johannesburg CBD.
He said some of the residents have been staying in that building since the 90s and are willing to pay rates to the City of Johannesburg.
“I can tell you now, providing alternative accommodation, it can take you 20 years or so. It might not even happen.
“I said, ‘Let us come together, let us see what we can do, let’s clean the building, let’s get you an account, let’s pay, let us all renovate this building’; because what is bad is that it is derelict, and it looks bad, and it brings all sorts of criminals,” he said.
Tshwaku also admitted that there are turf wars over these hijacked buildings. His comments also come at a time when the city is struggling to collect rates from residents.
Mashaba responds
Mashaba responded to Tshwaku’s statement in a post on X.
“We can’t be a country that negotiates with criminals,” he said.
He said most of these hijacked buildings are not even suitable for human habitation.
“People live in stench that is certainly going to affect their health in the long term…young children brought up in such squalor, daily harassed by criminal syndicates.
“Some of these buildings are used for human trafficking, harbouring literally free labour to criminal syndicates bringing counterfeit and expired goods into South Africa.
“MMC, please put the lives of people first and their human rights, politics 4th in line,” he said.
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Safety issues
He said Tshwaku’s proposal is good on paper, but for political point-scoring.
“Most of the buildings in the inner city are uninhabitable, and the majority of inhabitants are undocumented foreigners.
“The reclamation of these properties does not need political theatre, but a hard and uncompromising approach,” he said.
Mashaba said when he was the mayor of Johannesburg, there was a clear plan to reclaim and repurpose the problematic buildings in the CBD. But he said these plans were put on hold when the ANC coalition took over from the DA.
He had this message for Tshwaku: “Please ask the speaker’s office to demand JPC to give you the Inner-City Rejuvenation Plan approved by Council in 2017, supported by the EFF as well.”
Immigration in Joburg
Meanwhile, Tshwaku also told the SABC that the Department of Home Affairs must be more proactive in dealing with the challenge of illegal immigrants in the city.
“Why is there no home affairs concentration in the City of Johannesburg? We need them at night, we have to come up with ideas of what we are going to do because some of these people, they will take them to the border, but they will come back.
“We need solutions. What do we do? The borders are not secured, and it’s not our fault. Why are people not marching at the [Department of ] Home Affairs? Instead, they will come to us,” he said.
Meanwhile, Tshwaku said officials at the Department of Home Affairs are ineffective because they are overworked.
“They have not been promoted in years, they are still on the same rank, they do not have overtime, they do not have cars, there is a shortage of staff, quite a lot, they work from 8am to 9pm.
“If we have a problem with immigration, why is the government not putting more money [into] it? Who is going to be verifying all the undocumented people that are here?” he said.
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