'We can't negotiate with criminals': Mashaba slams Joburg's plan for hijacked buildings
ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has criticised Johannesburg MMC Mgcini Tshwaku’s reported plan to negotiate with tenants
Image: Timothy Bernard/Independent Newspapers
ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has criticised Johannesburg MMC Mgcini Tshwaku’s reported plan to negotiate with tenants of hijacked buildings.
Mashaba was responding to media reports that the MMC planned to engage tenants of hijacked buildings to determine who could afford rent and to prioritise negotiation over eviction. The City has been grappling with numerous hijacked and unsafe buildings in the inner city, many of which are said to be occupied by undocumented foreigners and controlled by criminal syndicates.
Mashaba said the plan amounts to “political theatre” and warned that negotiating with occupants could put residents, including children, at risk. He called for a firm approach focused on law enforcement and the reclamation of unsafe buildings.
"With utmost due respect to MMC Tshwaku, his proposal is only good on paper and for political convenience. Most of the buildings in the inner city of the City of Joburg are uninhabitable, and the majority of inhabitants are undocumented foreigners. The reclamation of these properties does not need political theatre, but a hard and uncompromising approach," Mashaba said.
Mashaba added that some of these buildings are used by criminal syndicates for activities such as human trafficking and harbouring forced labour, as well as the storage and distribution of counterfeit and expired goods.
"We can’t be a country that negotiate with criminals. People live in stench that is certainly going to affect their health in the long, in these buildings, with young children brought up in such squalor, daily harassed by criminal syndicates".
"Some of these buildings are used for human trafficking, harbouring literally free labour to criminal syndicates bringing counterfeit and expired goods into South Africa.MMC, please put the lives of people first and their human rights"
mthobisi.nozulela@iol.co.za
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