The City of Johannesburg is an interesting lot with an absurd philosophy and approach to pressing matters.
It seems to believe in the notion that if you repeat a lie several times it becomes the truth, and that if you ignore an issue, eventually it fizzles into thin air and ceases to exist.
A little over a month ago, I penned a comment on a potentially deadly war that is like a ticking time bomb and may explode at any time.
This was a humble call urging the City to address an issue that has all the credentials of turning into a nasty internecine war between residents in extensions 9 and 10. The call was about the City correcting its own bungling in the housing allocation in what is termed as the K206 Settlement which is widely regarded as extensions 9 and 10 of the far Eastbank.
In 2010, just before the Fifa World Cup, the City created a feudalistic arrangement of a landlord and tenant system of people with similar social and economic backgrounds.
It allocated flatlets to some families and adjoining back rooms on the ground floor to other families and ordered that the back room dwellers, now tenants, pay rent to the owners of the flatlets, now landlords.
This has never worked, and both sides have since been at each others’ throats. Landlords are demanding rentals which are allegedly never forthcoming from the so-called tenants.
Over the years, there have been sporadic fights and stabbings on both sides, as the landlords seek to enforce the payment of rent while tenants, on the other hand, have vowed that rentals will only be collected over their dead bodies.
The City has turned a blind eye to all these requests to right the wrong in the housing allocation and avert what could be a deadly war among residents. It seems unconcerned and continues to drag its feet on a matter of life and death for residents on opposite sides of the divide.
The quicker an amicable solution is found the better before there is any loss of life.
What do you think should be done to resolve the landlord-tenant conflict in extensions 9 and 10?
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