#RebuildSA: Owners watched live feed as 10 years of work, stolen in 24 hours

When Saahirah Sadek and her husband, Asif Khan, opened their first Mia Tile Mart in Isipingo, south of Durban, in 2011, they had nothing. But over the last ten years, they poured their blood, sweat and tears into the business – spawned from one Sadek’s own parents first started 25 years ago – and grew it into a successful brand with multiple family-owned stores in the area .

It took the mob of looters who stormed their stores earlier this month less than 24 hours to lay waste to their life’s work, though. 

“They stole everything. They left us with nothing – not even fittings and fixtures. They cleared us out of everything,” Sadek told The Citizen last week.

She and her husband, who now own two of their own stores, had a first-row seat to some of it and actually watched one of their stores being cleared out in real time on a CCTV feed.

“We were sitting at home, watching them use our pallet jacks to load our stock into their vehicles. And we were completely and utterly helpless, there was nothing we could do,” she said,

“There were thousands of them. And the police and the private security services – they were just completely outnumbered”.

Not only did they clean the Sadeks’ stores out completely, after they were done they also torched them.

By last week, the rubble the looters had left in their wake had already been neatly swept up but the stores still bore the scars of the blazes that had been set – their walls coated in a thick layer of soot and the smell of smoke hanging heavy in the air.

When they first learnt their stores had been hit, Sadek’s first reaction was one of shock.

But despite having lost more than R2 million in stock in one store alone, she is confident that they will be able to rebuild – so long as they receive the necessary support from government and the broader business community.

“We’re broken,” she said – but added the community had rallied together to try and pick up the pieces and that she had been buoyed by their efforts.

For now, though, a large part of their focus is on trying to get the 25-odd staff they employ through this challenging time.

“Our staff are our family and we have just as much love for them as we do for ourselves. They also have to eat and drink so we’ve just been trying to make sure they have what they need, distributing groceries etc to them,” she said.