A section of Alexandra could soon bleed if urgent leadership from the City of Johannesburg is not exhibited.
The City has bungled a serious and very crucial matter concerning the issue of housing, a hotly-debated subject in Alexandra, and residents are now prepared to kill or be killed for houses. Armed with this knowledge of the volatility of the subject, one would have expected the City to tread with the utmost of sensitivity when dealing with this issue, particularly when it comes to the allocation of houses and the principles applied therein.
In its expediency to create a humanistic front prior to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in order to impress international visitors, the City clumsily showed its incompetency by creating a feudalistic arrangement of a landlord and tenant system of people with similar social and economic backgrounds.
The City, under its notoriously incompetent and now disbanded Alexandra Renewal Project, turned non-working mkhukhu dwellers into landlords and their working counterparts into tenants.
They built RDP flats with two outside rooms in K206 and allocated them to non-working mkhukhu dwellers and their working counterparts were allocated the two outside rooms.
The flat owners were told that the two outside rooms were theirs and those allocated the outside rooms were their tenants. The tenants were ordered to pay rent of R350 a month to the new landlord, with the promise that after five years, they would be allocated their own houses too.
This was tantamount to setting these people against one another. A few months down the line, the tenants refused to pay the rentals, claiming that the new landlords were given the flats as RDP houses, and why they could not be given the backrooms as RDP even if it was just for the five-year period.
This was bungling of the worst order as some of these people shared the same social and economic hardships in the same mkhukhus or were even neighbours. The only thing that set them apart was a pittance in the form of salaries.
Now these people are at each others’ throats and the City does not feel obliged to solve its own bungling. Instead, it keeps dragging its feet on a matter of life and death for the landlords and tenants alike.
