Life inside the 'hijacked' Johannesburg building where scores burned alive
Johannesburg, Sihle Dube had rented a tiny room from someone who didn't actually own it, in a rundown building that was becoming a trash-strewn haven for drugs and crime.
On Thursday, he awoke to a bang at 2 a.m. — one of the few things he would remember about that night was seeing the time on his phone — and jumped up to check the entrance to his apartment.
Smoke came billowing in.
«It was unbearable; I couldn't breathe,» he said, covering his mouth for emphasis as he lay in a hospital bed the next day.
Dube scrambled into his trousers and tried to climb out of his first floor window, but he slipped on a satellite dish, fell and blacked out.
An ambulance rushed him to the Bertha Gxowa Hospital in nearby Germiston.
More than 70 others did not make it out alive, one of Johannesburg's worst disasters in living memory.
The deadly fire highlighted a problem that authorities have long failed to tackle: Johannesburg's city centre is so abandoned by business and the state that gangs and extortionists have moved in to fill the void.
Dozens of abandoned buildings have been «hijacked» or taken over by criminal syndicates who charge fees for staying there. Angela Rivers, general manager at the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association, said she knew of 57 such buildings in the central business district alone, most of them owned by the city or provincial government.
Many have become dilapidated centres of drug trafficking and other lawlessness.
Fires sometimes break out because residents rely on illegal electricity connections, gas burners and candles.
Investigators have not determined the cause of Thursday's blaze. But the brick apartment block, now gutted and blackened with soot, was one such building.
Johannesburg
