Durban Community Hall Left to Ruin by Municipality

Jabulani Hall in Verulam, north of Durban, has been left to ruin.

• Jabulani Hall in Verulam, north of Durban, has been left to ruin.
• Its dilapidated offices are occupied by people living in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, who say they were displaced by the April 2022 floods.
• But eThekwini Municipality spokesperson Gugu Sisilana says all flood victims were relocated to emergency accommodation sites.
• Local residents say the area is a crime hotspot and the hall has never functioned as a proper community hall.

Verulam’s community hall has fallen into ruin due to years of neglect by eThekwini Municipality.

Jabulani Hall, originally built in the 1980s for the community of Verulam, north of Durban, is in a state of disrepair, with broken windows and no locks on the doors. The hall is empty. In one corner, there are tyres and homemade concrete weights that form a makeshift gym.

A security guard on duty told GroundUp that use of the hall is not managed or scheduled. “People just go in and use it as they please,” he said.

We met Thabisile Mkhize, who had come to a soup kitchen which operates from a container in the parking lot every Wednesday.

Mkhize, who says she was displaced by the April 2022 floods, has been coming to the soup kitchen ever since. She said she has never seen the community market stalls outside the hall operating. The roofs of some stalls have collapsed.

Attached to the hall are also abandoned offices. They are now occupied by people who claim they were displaced by the floods in 2022 and were temporarily relocated to the hall by the municipality. They say they moved into the offices when the municipality closed the hall to flood victims yet did not provide alternative living arrangements for them.

The offices have collapsing ceilings and damp and stained walls. People use illegal electricity connections and burn rubbish in a hole behind the building. Toilets no longer flush.

Thandeka Mkhize, who lives in one of the offices with four other people, said the offices were already in a poor condition when they moved in.

She said they last saw municipal officials in 2022, when they were told they would be relocated to proper housing.

But Gugu Sisilana, eThekwini Municipality spokesperson, said all halls used for temporary accommodation were closed on 24 December 2022. She said all 1,200 households displaced by the floods were relocated to various emergency accommodation sites across the city, and “no families were left behind”.

Sisilana said the City suspects some people may be attempting to bypass the housing queue, as the MEC for human settlements had committed to building houses in Cornubia for flood-affected families.

Philisiwe Ngcobo, 80, stays in one of the offices with five grandchildren. She sleeps on the only bed in the room. The others sleep on mattresses on the floor.

She said her home was washed away in the flood. There was a landslide and therefore she cannot rebuild on the site.

She feels unsafe living in the hall’s offices. She was stabbed in her arm in an attempted burglary last year.

Imtiaz Khan, who lives nearby, said people are robbed when walking through the neglected area.

He said the hall had also been used to house flood victims back in 1987, during the Natal floods. He said it has never been used for community events.

He said they used to play around the hall as children, “but now it’s a no-go zone”.

He said the community had appealed to the municipality to make the area safer, but with no response.

Follow-up questions sent to the municipality about the hall’s decay have gone unanswered.

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