A Tragic Fire and Broken Promises in South Africa

A devastating fire in Johannesburg last week is raising troubling questions about chaos and dysfunction in Africa's richest city.

Today, my colleague, Lindsay, should tell on how the city that was once a symbol of the hope of post-apartheid South Africa is now an emblem of just how bad the breakdown has become.

It's Friday, September 8th.

So, Lindsay, tell me about the fire you've been reporting on in Johannesburg, which, as it turns out, is the deadliest residential fire in South African history.

it was all over the news. Firefighters rushed to the five-story building. Now, they are still searching through the building for more victims. And the death toll kept rising hour by hour. When I first turned on the TV, it was about 20 people.

Then it was 40 people. Then it was 60 people. And then, by the end of the day, it was 77 people. And I rushed down to the site, and the bodies were laid out in the street. You can literally see that the bodies have been covered with metal sheeting, with blankets.

People who had run out of the building were sitting there in shock on the sidewalk. And it was just a scene of such devastation. This is the building itself. You can see that it's burned from the back. It's burned from the front.

And up here, you can see some of the residents who were desperately trying to get out, had left a mattress there and were jumping from the top floors.

Even though the fire had been brought under control by the morning, by the time the sun came up, there was still smoke coming from the building. And there were just crowds and crowds of people. And what we realized is that these weren't onlookers. These were people who lived inside this building. So, up to about 600 people, possibly even more, just standing there their entire lives, just in ruin and in embers, quite frankly.

And thank goodness, there were very few fatalities. And you would think that seeing a giant crack on a main road would shock people. But it didn't. By day, two, people had to turn to their homes. They carried on.

They cordoned off the road. And that tells you something about what Johannesburg is as a city. In the last few years, we've seen Johannesburg slowly decaying, becoming worse and worse every day. And for those of us, particularly South Africans, what we're wondering is if the economic capital of the most prosperous part of the country, which is one of the most advanced economies in Africa, if you can't keep that city running, what does the rest of this country look like? And what is the hope for the rest of the country, quite frankly?

That is, the system of segregation where black and white and all races were kept separately. And this is where Nelson Mandela, the iconic freedom fighter, began this fight against apartheid. And this was with the sight of so much violence and political struggle and pain. It is my great pleasure to announce the President of the Republic of South Africa, Mr. Nelson Kholisala Mandela.

Then came 1994.. Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.

Apartheid ends and South Africa becomes a democracy. And Johannesburg sits at the center of that. It's the crown jewel of what South Africa could be.

Neighborhoods are integrating. Schools are integrating. And, for better or for worse, shopping malls are popping up all over during the early 90s, late 2000s. They've got glass ceilings and cinemas. The Big Mac has made it to South Africa.

And there's a McDonald's. The hamburger giant is planning to open another restaurant this month, then 15 more next year. And in downtown Johannesburg. at this time, even though white businesses and white families fled the inner city, feared in crime, they were replaced with migrants who came from all over the continent, from as far as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, who had all come bringing their hopes to Johannesburg. And so it becomes this multicultural, diverse economic powerhouse that just draws people from everywhere.

And then... The decision was taken after only one round of voting. FIFA announces that... The 2010 FIFA World Cup will be organized in South Africa.

The first African World Cup will be held in South Africa. It's uniting people.

But beyond the World Cup, things began to fall apart. And that's where the disappointment begins to set in.

This party that had these grand visions for South Africa becomes mired in corruption scandals from top to bottom, from the presidency all the way down to your local street councillor.

But what that means is that the money that should have been spent on building schools, on paying for university tuition, on building hospitals, has disappeared. Unemployment is rising. There's an economic crisis that is growing. And it turns into this sense of desperation that also drives violent crime in the city. And perhaps the most material way South Africans are feeling it is that we literally find ourselves in the dark.

Around about 2012, 2013,, rolling blackouts become worse and worse. And South Africans learn to live with the fact that the country is unable to supply electricity. And that is just one of the many things it was unable to supply. And by 2019, particularly here in Johannesburg, there was a backlash against the African National Congress when voters decided that they would not keep the ANC in power and voted them out.

But those coalition governments were so rickety that Johannesburg was no longer a party. Johannesburg has had six mayors in the last two years alone.

A couple of weeks ago, the copper cables on my street were stolen. Copper cables have become a great underground business. And so people rip out the copper wiring, and it's sold as scrap metal. And that means that in your street, you will not have electricity, in my case, for up to a week.

There are these huge, crater-sized potholes. And, terrifyingly, in a city with high crime, the streetlights don't work in so many neighborhoods. And that's what led me to start reporting on the decay of Johannesburg, and just exactly what was happening. And back in May, my colleague Joao Silva, the photographer, and I, actually ended up at 80 Albert Street, which is the building that is now burned and become the center of such an awful tragedy. And what I found was a hijacked building.

And under threat of violence, the people who do live there, or people who want to move in, they start collecting rent. So the landlord is completely kicked out, and people, criminals, will collect rent for these buildings, in which there's often no running water, no electricity, no fire escapes, no trash collection. And the worst part is that there are dozens of them around the city.

They will be shot. But there are also people who can't afford to live anywhere else. And so they're living in these conditions as well. So it's a mix of the exploitation of Johannesburg's working poor, those people who came to Jo'burg to try and build a life and find that they can't even afford accommodation.

It was pitch dark. It was the middle of the day, but it was pitch dark inside the building because there was no light. And there were rats scurrying around. And, of course, my colleague, Joao Silva, who is a well-known war photographer... Indeed.

...went back the next day because he was determined to take a look inside. And he got only as far as the lobby.

But in the aftermath of the fire, we've gotten a closer sense of what happened behind those closed doors where Joao wasn't able to go, talking to the survivors, people who lived inside this building, and how they feared for their lives and how even they saw that this was an inevitability.

Many used to think that this route was impassable, but thousands have been risking their lives to pass through the Darién, almost all in the hopes of making it to the United States. We spent nine days hiking through the gap and weeks building trust and relationships with migrants, with smugglers, with migration authorities, to even be able to do this reporting. We interviewed hundreds of people who have made this journey to try and grasp what's making them go to these lengths to find a new life. New York Times journalists spend time in these places to help you understand what's really happening there. You can support this kind of journalism by subscribing to the New York Times.

And next to her is her daughter.

They had just moved from one hijacked building, where it had become too unsafe for them because of the criminality in that building, into this building here. And how long were you living in the building?

They'd been there for a couple months, but they said that life was hell. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad to a point where sometimes, during the night, we'd have to wake up and lie on our stomachs because there were gunshots right in the passing. It was bad.

It was bad. Sometimes at night, we'd hear girls screaming.

They had no toilets, and so they would walk up to the shopping mall two to three blocks up the road during the day. And at night, when it became too unsafe, they would relieve themselves in buckets and keep it in the room. I had to be at home by five, as long as it's not dark yet. The daughter could not get into the building after dark, not because she was afraid of what was happening outside. You'd have people rob you inside the building.

But because inside the building. She would rush home and lock herself in the room before sunset.

The only way to keep the room warm is to make a small fire in the room. And they knew this was a fire hazard and it was an awful choice that they had to make every day. So they knew that this building was going to be life-threatening.

Then I have decided that I must pray. And she says, quite frankly, that something felt off. So there was a sense of fear. A sense of foreboding, and she began to pray. Then, after I prayed, when I was about to go back to sleep on my bed, I heard something like the sound of a gun outside.

And what she remembers thereafter is suddenly she heard screaming. Saying, the shelter is burning, the shelter is burning. And people were banging on the doors and said, there's a fire, there's a fire in the building. And what it seemed is that in one of the shacks on the ground floor or in the lot outside, there seems to have been a fire. And of course, we don't know exactly what the cause is just yet, but we do know that that fire spread rapidly because of the materials within this abandoned, stripped building.

Then I just took my clothes, I took a duvet, then I walked out, I locked the bedlock gate. I was praying in my heart that day, may God just protect me, just show me the way. Pearl says she got out of her room, but she locks the door because she's hoping that she's able to come back at some point. And she grabs what she can. She says she didn't have time to grab her daughter's school books.

And she runs outside. And as she's running, she takes the risk of running down the stairs. We know a lot of people were too afraid as the fire leapt up and they jumped out of the third floor. Pearl is one of the lucky ones that made it down the stairs. But she says on one of the floors, there was a locked door.

And she heard banging and banging. And she says it was a sound that she will never forget, of a man screaming on the other side of a locked door. And she had to make that choice. Did she go and try and free him? She doesn't have a key.

It's the choice of, does she save herself for her daughter, who she lives for? Or does she run and try and save this man who she doesn't know? Because the truth is, she doesn't really know her neighbours. And so many of the people, when I spoke to them outside, they said, we didn't really know who we were living next door to, because people were in and out.

She just ran out. She makes the choice and she runs in the opposite direction from the man that was screaming.

And when she finally makes it out into the street, she looks back and the building is aflame. So, while we were standing there,

But her daughter, she's hardening herself at this point. She says that, quite frankly, she just wants to move on from 8th year Albert Street. I feel like all these people are relieved that what happened happened because they were looking for a way out. You're looking at them and they're free and they're relieved deep down inside because it was hell.

She doesn't want to have that memory.

So my colleague, John Eligo, found a trove of documents that showed emails between city environmental officials sending emails to people in the health department, their colleagues in public safety, their colleagues in the Johannesburg Property Company, which was the state-owned entity that ran this company. And they said, we have had inspections here at least from 2017.. They listed all the problems with the building and they said that this is a bad building. It is turning into an emergency situation and we should do something about it. What we did not find is what exactly people did about it.

Residents who live across the road, those are the people that I interviewed back in May already, said that they had also called the police. They called the police when they heard screams. They called the police when they thought there was a murder, when they saw a woman being thrown off the third or fourth floor. And the police would come, there would be a raid, but then life would return to normal. And it would just go right back to the way things were.

And so there are all these failures at every step. And when city officials were doing this sort of tour around the disaster, giving press conferences, giving press briefings, blaming each other, I asked one of the city officials, when was the last time you were inside this building? When was the last time there was an inspection? And he said to me, it was in 2019, because we couldn't risk going into a hostile environment, hostile environment where people lived.

What would you say it is?

a symbol of the disappointment of what South Africa could have been. Johannesburg has all these precincts in which the city tried to build and create and make it safe and livable. But even as I was driving here, I would see a developed building and next door was a hijacked building. Every time there is one step forward, there are two to three steps back. And, to be sure, there are great gleaming stretches of the city that still show the old promise.

But more and more, for so many people, the city just doesn't hold the promise that it used to.

The city is struggling to rise above this political disaster. It's struggling to rise above decades of neglect. And it's struggling to rise above what is becoming a national problem in South Africa, where it seems as if there is no clear path forward. And it seems as if the people who have been entrusted in steering the city and steering the country into this future that everybody dreamed about in 1994 are unable to do it.

And so, for the people that I've been talking to, what they're seeing this is is a leaderless city. And that question is important because we are months away from a pivotal election. Next year is not only the 30-year anniversary of democracy in South Africa. It's also an election year where some pundits are saying that they believe that the ANC will go to its lowest margin, yet. It will still win.

But what we're seeing, then, is that likely that it will be at its weakest. And so what we're questioning, then, is who steps into that gap. And what I think is that the lesson here is rather than relying on a political party to step into that gap. What I have seen in the days after the fire is South Africans and immigrant communities coming together to try and help each other, to feed each other, to find homes for each other, to help each other bury their dead. And so what I hope is that South Africans will find their humanity in what has truly been an absolute tragedy.

And I hope that, unlike the previous times, that Johannesburg doesn't just move on from this one.

Here's what else you should know today. On Thursday...

And Peter Navarro, a trade advisor to former President Donald Trump, was convicted on Thursday of criminal contempt of Congress over his defiance of a subpoena from the House Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The verdict, in federal district court in Manhattan, made Mr. Navarro the second top advisor of Trump's to be found guilty of contempt for defying the committee's inquiry. Stephen Bannon, a former strategist for Mr. Trump, was convicted of the same offense last summer.

Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennesketter, Luke Van Der Ploeg, and Alex Stern. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon-Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Van Der Ploeg, M.J. Davis-Lynn, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoit, Liz O'Balin, Aastha Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bancha, Diana Nguyen, Marian Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Zipko, Alisha Baitoub, Mouj Zadeh, Patricia Willans, Rowan Nemisto, Jodi Becker, Ricky Nevetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reed, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexi Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Landman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devin Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Tamad, and Olivia Natt.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnik, Paula Schumann, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sophia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddie Messiello, Isabella Anderson, and Nina Lassam. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.