Spotlight On Inner City Housing in Johannesburg Fire Aftermath

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In the wake of a devastating fire that killed at least 77 people in a five-storey building in downtown Johannesburg, Richard Ballard, researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory at the University of the Witwatersrand, writes for The Conversation Africa that the blaze has elicited unhelpful responses from some city officials and politicians. "They have placed the blame on the informal occupation of abandoned buildings, a phenomenon known as 'hijacking'. They have also blamed immigrant populations who, they say, are the primary residents of such buildings. To solve the problem, they argue, hijacked buildings should be expropriated and redeveloped by the private sector." But Ballard argues that this is a distraction from the urgent work of reducing risks in the living environments of the poor, and reducing the risk of fire more generally. "The rhetoric by politicians and city officials treats the latest tragedy as a freakish problem of hijacked buildings occupied by migrant populations... In Johannesburg, fires are not limited to 'hijacked' buildings. They have also occurred in legally occupied buildings. Furthermore, fires are not a specific risk to inner city populations. "They are a regular occurrence in shack settlements across the city. The use of this tragedy by some politicians to argue in favour of removing hijacked buildings is part of a longstanding pattern of blaming the poor for the conditions and justifying further suffering that they wish to heap on them," he writes.