Lack of service delivery partly to blame for Thulani Popoyi’s brutal death

Ward 87 councillor Amanda Forsythe writes;

Robert Thulani Popoyi was a big, strong, handsome young man of 29 who loved girls and playing rugby for Pirates Club and the Lions. He worked for a famous theatre producer in an events company and was well know and well loved in Melville.

Popoyi was found dead at 5am on 5 October, lying on the pavement outside the gate of an illegal club called Dollar Table on the corner of 7th street and 3rd avenue, Melville. He had been stabbed several times in the neck and chest and his arms were slashed from wounds that were probably inflicted while he was trying to defend himself. He also had knife wounds to the head. It was so brutal that even the Brixton Police who came to the scene were visibly shaken and one informed me that he and his colleagues would surely need trauma counselling afterwards.

This will be the fourth of five children that Popoyi’s mother, will have to bury, including another son who was murdered during a mugging in Westbury a few years ago. Yesterday, when she was informed of Popoyi’s death, she broke down and cried saying she just wanted to die now.

The reason I’m telling you this story is because we all share some responsibility for Popoyi’s death. You may be shocked by this statement, but it is true and I want you to please read on so that you will understand how the work that we do is not just about responding to complaints and service delivery issues but about the safety and well being of the people we serve – people like Popoyi.

Although Popoyi’s body was discovered outside on the pavement, further investigation revealed that he had been killed inside Dollar Table. I rushed to the scene at 8am as soon as I was informed of the situation and assisted the police in contacting the business and property owners to gain access to the courtyard behind Dollar Table and finally, to get inside the premises itself, where we found a lot of blood and other evidence pointing to a very brutal murder inside the club.

Dollar Table is an illegal club, operating on the restaurant licence of a place called ‘Soi’ that closed it’s doors in about 2001. I have reported it to the police, the Liquor Board, my Ward Inspector, Environmental Health, the Metro police and various other departments for over a year now. It has been raided and shut down on several occasions, but continually just reopens it’s doors and continues trading with impunity. Everyone in the community, businesses and residents alike, complains about the noise, the fights and other disturbances coming from Dollar Table. I have forwarded many of these complaints to you, but somehow they were allowed to just keep trading.

Yesterday, as I spent the day on the street outside Dollar Table assisting the police and trying to comfort Popoyi’s friends and family who came to the scene, I heard more stories about Dollar Table and what really went on there, including really scary stories of fights and people getting beaten up.

These incidences should never have happened! If Dollar Table had been closed down as it should have been a long time ago, they wouldn’t have and perhaps Popoyi would be alive today if we had succeeded in preventing this business from openly flouting the law and bringing criminal elements into our neighbourhood.

And to those City officials who are reading this and think they are absolved of guilt because their department is not directly involved in closing illegal businesses down, I want you to continue reading and think again.

The reason why a place like Dollar Table is able to thrive in a suburb like Melville is because the lack of care and attention given to basic services and infrastructure has allowed urban decay to set in. And when a place starts looking delapidated, uncared for and unpoliced, it becomes the perfect environment for vagrants, beggars, drug dealers, illegal problematic car guards, etc. And when those elements are allowed to proliferate in an area, the more serious criminals move in. Why? Because clearly no one cares for the place and there is a law enforcement vacuum that they can thrive in.

And as I walked up and down 7th street and 3rd avenue yesterday, the rot that has been allowed to set in became more and more apparent: the severely degraded roads and pavements, the missing manhole and water meter covers, the broken street lights, the faded road markings, the missing traffic signs, the drunken/ drugged up car guards passed out on the pavement, the illegal parking, the illegal dumping, the storm water drains filled with litter, the leaking water meters and the stench of blocked sewers, to name but a few of the issues.

I say ‘we’ in this letter because I accept part of the blame too. As I looked around yesterday while assisting at the scene, I kept asking myself: what I could have done better or differently to prevent this from happening? Normally, reporting and escalating problems to officials should be sufficient to sort them out, but when that doesn’t work, what do we do? I’ve requested visible service delivery clean-ups and raids, I’ve submitted petitions, written to members of the Mayoral Committee and senior department officials, I’ve tried to rally the businesses together in a Business Association and attempted to get residents involved in caring for and improving their suburb. Clearly this hasn’t been enough. Clearly I have to do more, work harder and shout louder for everyone to listen.

And by everyone, I mean the community too. I am well aware that it is not just City officials who can solve the problems we face in Melville and other suburbs. It is a joint responsibility between officials, law enforcement authorities, businesses and residents.

Businesses and their landlords need to start taking responsibility for what happens inside their premises and in the suburb that they operate in. They can do more to respect the law, clean up and secure their area and put pressure on their peers to do the same. Some businesses are trying hard to do this, but without support from fellow businesses and from city officials, it feels like an uphill battle and many give up.

Residents also need to take more responsibility for what happens in their suburb. They too should have more respect for the law. They can also more actively report service delivery issues, help clean up the litter, dumping, graffiti and illegal posters, stop encouraging begging and vagrancy in the suburb by donating money to charities that assist the homeless and substance abusers instead of giving handouts on our streets, etc. Again, some residents try, but unless they get support from the rest of the community and from city officials, it seems like a losing battle.

Colin Law, Popoyi’s guardian, told me yesterday that if this terrible tragedy could serve as a wake-up call to all of us then maybe his death would not have been vain. I hope that after reading this you will agree and be motivated enough to assist me in preventing such a thing from happening again. I hope it will help put the work you do and your attitude to the law and law enforcement into perspective and make us realise that every single one of us has a part to play in the life or death of our suburbs and certainly in the tragic death of Popoyi, whom we all failed.