In Decoligny, a village outside Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, Sizeka Sithelo died a horrible death, trapped inside a house when she could not open the door because of raging floodwaters.
Her brother, Aron, said: “During the night, she called for help, saying she was trapped inside. She was screaming. I told her to break the roof and stay on top until the water subsided. I kept phoning her, asking her not to panic, but our phones died.”
Sizeka drowned when the house was submerged. Her voice and shrill screams will haunt her brother for years, if not for as long as he lives.
The pictures out of the Eastern Cape tell a tale of anguish. Houses submerged. Body bags carried away. A grandmother, Lumka Ndzendze, watching helplessly as floodwater flattens her home, wondering if her children will make it. What chance did they have, though? They too perished, but not before she ran back in a bid to rescue them.
“When I got there, everything was underwater. I could not even see the rooftops.”
It would have been the longest night for anybody. “I did not sleep. I just sat and waited for daybreak,” she said.
All this occurred while Eastern Cape leaders slept soundly, since they reside at the right addresses and have no worries about flooding.
The tragedy that befell the people of the Eastern Cape was not so much the result of nature’s wrath as the paucity of quality leadership in the province — or perhaps their profound lack of interest in the poor. The deaths of at least 90 people at last count should make us all sick to the stomach. They must spur us into uncomfortable conversations about those lives so needlessly lost.
These include the young who perished on their way to school at Efata, near Mthatha, and the old who died in their sleep or en route to work. Most of the affected live in informal settlements, and the attention they receive from the authorities is also decidedly informal, as is the leadership they are shown.
Their houses were destroyed because they were built in flood-prone areas. Why was this allowed? This basic question spawns many others. The dwellers invaded the land because they had nowhere else to live. But that fact raises even more questions about what is being done to attend to the perennial land question in our country. Why can’t our leaders — all of them from 1994 — be decisive about what needs to be done and not simply ignore this festering sore?
In Mthatha, and I suppose everywhere else, it is easy to see why the dwellers invaded Slovo Park — because it’s closer to economic activity. But what is worse is the local leaders servicing these sites, tarring roads in return for votes when they know the dangers inherent in people living there.
In Joburg, former mayor Parks Tau came up with a beautiful name for spatial justice — “Corridors of Freedom”. In terms of this programme, the city created social housing closer to economic centres and married this to the city’s Rea Vaya bus system in a bid to undo apartheid planning that intentionally housed black people outside urban centres.
Crude though it may sound, the destruction of flood-zone settlements isn’t cruelty towards the poor but rather a form of tough love
While Corridors of Freedom was great, the mayors who came after Tau have abandoned it. Without these social housing corridors, poor people have been forced to invade buildings. Of late, even the city’s headquarters, Metro Centre, is home to vagrants and rats. It’s a shame, really.
Even more shameful is that the destroyed houses in Slovo Park will be rebuilt. Yes, rebuilding in Slovo Park is a sick joke played on those poor people. No-one should live in a flood zone. Crude though it may sound, the destruction of flood-zone settlements isn’t cruelty towards the poor but rather a form of tough love.
A leadership that cared about the pain of the people now in mourning would take them out of harm’s way. But a leadership that goes to Slovo Park to sing with the poor, hand them blankets and pretend to care about their plight, before moving away to sleep in their own solid structures away from the floodplain, shows no concern for those they have left exposed to future floods.
If Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane cared enough, he’d do what was necessary right now — and not return after the next wave of floods carrying blankets and shedding crocodile tears.
The truth is, we avoid the truth when faced with tragedy. No-one wants to tell poor people who have invested their hard-earned money in bricks and mortar on a floodplain to demolish their life’s work. No-one wants to tell them their homes will trap them, as Sizeka Sithelo’s did. They’d rather mollycoddle the poor by offering them blankets and mattresses, and perhaps soup, thereby assuaging the current pain — until the next wave of floods hits. That is not love, and it is certainly not leadership.
The best way of paying our respects to Sizeka Sithelo is not by offering her brother, Aron, soup and blankets — it is by ensuring he doesn’t perish in his own home in the manner his sister did because we wanted to avoid uncomfortable conversations. By destroying houses in flood zones, we would be obviating future deaths and tragedies. To bury our heads in the sand and simply hope it doesn’t happen again is the height of folly.
The alternative is to hold politicians accountable for being complicit in such tragedies for not doing anything about these settlements that are deathtraps for poor communities. The soup doesn’t wash away the pain. Sithelo’s screams should haunt us all.
This sorry saga is not limited to the poor of the Eastern Cape, because flood-zone settlements such as Decoligny, Slovo Park and many others are found throughout our country. The next tragedy may occur elsewhere, but the reasons underpinning it will be the same, sadly.
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