The Daily: A Tragic Fire and Broken Promises in South Africa

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily.

A devastating fire in Johannesburg last week is raising troubling questions about chaos

and dysfunction in Africa's richest city.

Today, my colleague Lindsay Choutel, 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.

So last Thursday, at about one o'clock in the morning,

smoke began to rise from this downtown building, and by the time I woke up.

Massive blaze in the Johannesburg CBD this morning. It is a very quickly developing story.

It was all over the news.

The 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 ruins and in embers, quite frankly.

And as someone who's from Johannesburg, how did you understand what had happened?

What did it look like to you?

It felt horribly inevitable. So we have had a series of disasters in Johannesburg,

and we've kind of just quickly moved on from them.

For example, a few weeks ago, a street quite literally exploded in downtown Johannesburg.

Cars flew up into the air, 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?

Okay, so let's talk about that. How did Johannesburg get here? Walk me through it.

Bring me back to those hopeful early days.

So Johannesburg is a relatively young city. It was when gold was discovered here in 1886

that everybody rushed here. And everybody from Eastern Europe all the way to China came to

find their lives here and to make their fortunes here. It was an incredibly diverse city,

but ironically, it's also where apartheid began. 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 site 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 Holishasha 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.

The 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. A 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, would all come bringing

their hopes to Johannesburg. And so it becomes this multicultural, diverse economic powerhouse

that just draws people from everywhere. And that in 2010. The decision was taken after only one

round of open. 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, it's everything,

it's freedom, it's everything, I just love it. And it's a real sense of optimism,

because the stadiums are going up, hotels are going up. Very well down to South Africa.

I've never thought I could do it, but I did it, man, I did it. I feel it for them.

And it's this beautiful moment of what South Africa could be.

We feel safe on the trains and coming here. It's a good vibe at the moment.

Hopefully it can carry on after that.

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

So walk me through that. What changed?

So at this point, the party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress, is still in power.

But we're beginning to see a different side of that party.

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 counselor.

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 the sense of desperation that also drives violent crime in the city.

And perhaps the most material ways that Africans are feeling it is that we literally find ourselves in the dark.

Around about 2012, 2013, rolling blackouts become worse and worse.

And so the Africans learn to live with the fact that the country is unable to supply electricity.

And that is just one of the many things that 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.

And what happened when they were voted out? Like, what did that mean for Johannesburg?

Well, what that meant was political chaos. So smaller parties suddenly became kingmakers,

parties that ministers of African voters had never even heard of. They were at the bottom of the ballot.

And suddenly they became the swing vote. And these parties were then able to form coalition

governments. But those coalition governments were so rickety that Johannesburg has had six

mayors in the last two years alone. Wow. A mayor for each season.

Precisely. I bet you if you asked any Joe Berger who the mayor is, they're not quite sure themselves.

And so at this point, what that means is who do you call when you're in trouble?

Who do you call when services aren't working? 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. Wait, the copper cable

in your street was stolen like from city power lines? From city power lines. So what happens

is because we have these rolling blackouts, there is no electricity running through the

copper cables. And that is the perfect time to rip them out of the ground, to rip them out of power

stations and to sell them as scrap metal. And it's not just the copper theft. It is the trash

collection and the heaps of trash that are piling up around the city. There are these huge crater-sized

potholes and terrifyingly in a city with high crime, the street lights 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 Joelle Silver, the photographer and I

actually end 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. Okay, what exactly is a hijacked

building? Like I think of a plane or a car when you use the word hijack. And that's nearly exactly

what it is. So what happens is that you have a building that is seen as vulnerable, a building

where the landlord is missing, where it's clear that there are no, there's nobody taking care of

this building. And so what you'll find is that groups of criminals, groups of gangs sometimes,

will walk into a building and start taking over rooms. And they'll take over a room, there's a

wheel of here now. And under pressure violence, the people who do love 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 is 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. So it's almost as if these people, the hijackers are kind of taking the

building hostage, right? Like they have seized it, and they're extracting rent from people.

Precisely. You can quite literally steal a building and have it function as a residential building

without any oversight from the city and without any response from the city.

Wow, that is wild.

That is wild. And it is, what happens is that if it of the building that has been hijacked,

is that it affects the entire block. And so the people were living inside because it's a mix

of people, right? But the easiest is for criminals to move into these buildings. And so people walking

past these buildings will often be mugged. 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 Johannesburgs working poor, those people who came to Joberg

to try and build a life and find that they can't even afford accommodation.

And how many of these buildings are there in Johannesburg?

The number itself varies. The highest estimate is that it could be as many as 600. But that includes

empty lots and houses because just as you can steal a building, you can also quite literally

steal someone's house. So what was this building like inside when you went in May?

So I will be completely honest. I didn't go quite inside. Oh no.

So the people living across the road warned us that we would absolutely be robbed if we went

near this building. And so we watched people going in and out and we saw this heap of trash

right at the entrance. We saw another heap of trash on the other side of the building

sagging on the ease. The windows were broken. 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 Joar 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. If my colleague Joar Silva only went as far as the lobby,

Joar Silva is one of the most fearless people I know. We were together in Afghanistan.

It must have been pretty bad. It was a case of he didn't know who was behind which door. And

that's where the threat would be. And so Joar walks around the lobby and he sees exposed wire. He

sees doors hanging off the hinges. And he just remarked over and over just how dark and unsafe

the building itself was. But in the aftermath of the fire, we've gotten a closer sense of what

happened behind those closed doors, which I wasn't able to go talk into 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.

We'll be right back.

I'm Kevin Roos. And I'm Casey Newton. We're technology reporters and the hosts of Hard Fork,

a show from the New York Times. A Hard Fork is a programming term for when you're building

something that gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it, and start over.

And that's a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry. Like,

these companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade,

they're all kind of struggling to stay relevant. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the energy and money in

Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas. Crypto, the metaverse, AI, it feels like a real

turning point. And all this is happening so fast. Some of it's so strange. I just feel like I'm

texting you constantly. Like, what is this story? Explain this to me. And so we're going to talk

about these stories. We're going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is

involved in building this future to explain to us what's changing and why it all matters.

Hard Fork from the New York Times. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

So Lindsay, you finally find out what it's like to live in this building because you've talked

to some of the people who live there. What did they say?

So the morning after the fire, I go to a community center nearby that is housing

many of the survivors. And in one of the halls, women have been sleeping on donated mattresses

with blankets. Can I come closer? Yes. And on one of those rolled up mattresses,

I find a young woman and her mother. Her mother's name is Pearl. She's in her early 50s.

And next to her is her daughter. The building we used to live at is another hijacked one.

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? This is the third month. They've been there for a couple months, but they said that life

was hell. It was bad. It was bad. It was bad to have came to a bite. Sometimes during the night,

we'd have to wake up and lie on our stomachs because they were gun shots right in the passing.

It was bad. It was bad. Sometimes at night, we'd hear girls screaming. And you guys are

paying the rent. Yes. That's the worst part. They shared a room that was designed for just

two women on single beds. There were about four women in that room. They pay more than

a thousand rand for this little corner of a room, which is about $50 just over. And they get this

money from Pearl, who cleans the streets and from her daughter's tuition fee that she gets

from the state as a college student. They had no running water. And so would use water from the

fire hydrant or collect water from an open drain. Whenever you had to pee or leave yourself, you

had to go like four streets away, go to cops. 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. We'd have people rob you inside the

building. But because of 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.

And how did they describe the night of the fire? So on the night of the fire,

the daughter had been studying late and it was too unsafe to go home. So she stayed with a friend

and it was just her mom at home. And her mom, Pearl says, round about after one AM,

she'd gotten up and she wanted to relieve herself. And she says quite frankly that something felt

off. So there was a sense of foreboding and she began to pray. And what she remembers

thereafter is suddenly she heard screaming. 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.

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 schoolbooks. And she runs outside. And as she's running, she takes the risk of running

down the stairs. You 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 is 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 to go and try and free him. She doesn't have a key.

I never, I never, I just thought of myself. I had to save myself because I know that I have a child

to live. If I die, she'll be left alone. That's what was running in my mind, that you know what,

you cannot die in this fire. You have to save yourself for this child.

It's the choice of, does she save herself for her daughter, who she loves 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 neighbors.

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. Then no one went there because we were

running for our lives. We didn't know how far is the fire and what is going to happen. Maybe the

building is going to explode. We just ran out. She makes the choice and she runs in the opposite

direction from the man that we're screaming. And when she finally makes it out into the street,

she looks back and the building is a flame. So while we're standing there, some of the people

are throwing themselves from the roof. Second floor, third floor, people are dying in front of us.

And people are jumping and some of them are falling to their deaths. And as she's saying,

she shakes her head and tears are just filling her eyes. But her daughter, she's hardening herself

at this point. She says that quite frankly, she just wants to move on from 80 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 to

dip down inside because it was hell.

She doesn't want to have that memory.

You said that people clearly knew that a fire like this was possible, that these hijacked

buildings are a phenomenon and that there are over 600 of them. You called this

inevitable in some ways. So who's at fault here?

You know when I got to the scene, I asked the mayor that same question. I said,

people have been calling you about this building for years to my records at least since May. So

who is at fault here? And he said, while his administration is new, everyone is at fault.

And that is a catch-all because that means that no one person will be held accountable here because

what this building represents is a series of failures within the city and a series of failures

within the country, quite frankly. 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 turn 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 the 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

infection? And he said to me, it was in 2019 because we couldn't risk going into a hostile

environment, hostile environment where people lived. So stepping back for a minute here, Lindsay,

you know, going back to something we talked about at the beginning of our conversation,

Johannesburg as the symbol of hope and optimism that really all of us had about South Africa back

in 1994. And now here we have this. And I mean, you know, I don't want to read too much into it,

we just had our own disastrous fire in the state of Hawaii. But it does seem safe to say that this

fire has shown Johannesburg to be a symbol of something else. What would you say it is?

I think Johannesburg at this point 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.

Lindsay, as someone from Johannesburg, whose life has spanned this period, how do you see it?

You know, I grew up between a part of Soweto and Johannesburg suburbs. I was

bussed into school back and forth every day. I've travelled from one end of Johannesburg.

And what I've loved about the city is its innovation, its diversity, its sense of energy.

And what I am finding is that the spirit of the city is slowly waning and struggling.

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 have been talking to, what they're seeing this 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 AMC will go to its lowest

margin yet. It will still win. But what we're seeing then is the 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.

Let me tell you something, New Yorkers. Never in my life have I had a problem

that I did not see an end into. I don't see an end into this.

New York Mayor Eric Adams escalated his rhetoric over the influx of migrants to the city, claiming

in stark terms that the crisis was existential. This issue will destroy New York City. Adams,

a Democrat in his second year in office, has clashed with leading members of his party as

New York City has struggled to provide housing and services to the migrants who now number

110,000. For months, he has criticized President Biden and New York's Governor,

Kathy Hochel, for failing to help the city. But his comments on Thursday were the most ominous yet

and drew praise from Republicans and condemnation from some Democrats.

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 Tennis-Sketter, Luke Vander Ploeg, and Alex Stern. It

was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marianne Lozano, and was engineered

by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansverk of Wonderly.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lindsay Garrison, Claire Tennis-Sketter, Paige Cowett,

Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee Young,

Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Vander Ploeg, MJ Davis Lin, Dan Powell,

Sydney Harper, Michael Benoit, Liz O'Bailen, Asta Chaturvedi, Rachelle Boncha, Diana Nguyen,

Marianne Lozano, Corey Shrupple, Rob Zipko, Alicia Beytube, Mouge Zaidi, Patricia Willins, Rowan

Nemisto, Jody Becker, Ricky Nevetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reed, Carlos Prieto, Ben

Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexi Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Ferrell, Sophia Landman, Shannon Lin,

Diane Wong, Devin Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Tamad, and Olivia Natt.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Schumann, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon,

Sophia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Barelli,

Maddie Messiello, Isabella Anderson, and Nina Lassem.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.

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