OPINION | No dignity to be found in rubble-ridden townships

Travelling through the townships of Durban, you’ll ask yourself, what happened to the pride of cleaning one’s yard and flower garden?

How did we come to co-exist with dirt and rubble inside spaces that once carried dignity and order? The decline is most visible in stands with backyard and stand-alone rental dwellings, where density has increased without planning, care, or restraint. What was once a domestic space of pride has steadily become an informal market.

Where is Sunbeam and the pantyhose to shine the stoep? Where is the everyday ethic of maintenance, responsibility, and pride in one’s immediate environment—the small space to practice pantsula dance and twalatsa moves? The small flower space to take “same time” camera pictures?

These were not aesthetic habits. They were social practices that signalled order, respect, and accountability amidst oppression and disposition.

Though households need money, and backyard dwelling provides viable livelihoods, I still struggle to understand why tenants must live in such poor sanitary conditions. Poverty does not require filth. Survival does not demand neglect. Economic necessity does not automatically justify the collapse of basic standards of living.

Across Durban’s townships, unplanned density has been normalised, almost expected. What is more troubling is that the municipality itself violates its own bylaws by approving developments without proper traffic management plans, without adequate bulk infrastructure, and without serious consideration of safety. Planned density supports proximity and opportunity. Unmanaged density produces congestion, conflict, and violence.

Environmental degradation deepens this crisis. Municipal waste collection has not recovered in many townships and informal settlements. Uncollected garbage accumulates on street corners and open spaces, turning residential environments into informal landfill sites. Rats multiply, drainage systems clog, and health risks mount.

Environmental neglect has become a daily condition rather than an emergency. Later we hear that beaches have been closed for swimming because, as the project management adage goes, problems downstream are a consequence of neglect upstream.

These dynamics converge with particular intensity in Inanda. For over two decades Inanda has been a national crime question, yearly cited yet rarely confronted in its full social complexity. Crime there cannot be reduced to policing alone. Its determinants are spatial, environmental, economic, and institutional.

The proliferation of unlicensed taverns, many operating from residential yards of formal and informal dwellings, has transformed parts of Inanda into sites of persistent violence. These spaces are commonly associated with stabbings, murder, and rape. Alcohol abuse, overcrowding, absence of youth recreation and development opportunities, unemployment, and weak regulation intersect, producing violence that appears routine rather than exceptional.

Unplanned density has erased the boundary between residential life and commercial exploitation. Every meter of land becomes a potential rental unit and even an illegal trading zone. Yards are repeatedly subdivided, rooms are erected without services or access routes, and tenants are crowded into unsafe conditions, even on riverbanks, with dire consequences when the flash flood arrives.

Economic migrants from rural provinces pay high rents to live close to work, while landlords extract value with little reinvestment into infrastructure or safety. What is often framed as survival increasingly resembles greed.

We landlords in Inanda, as in many old townships such as Clermont, also bear responsibility for this overcrowding. We prioritise income over decent living and sometimes over the safety of our own girl children. Overcrowding destroys privacy, supervision, and accountability. It creates conditions in which abuse flourishes. These outcomes are not accidental. They are structurally produced.

It is also widely known that many backyard dwellings rely on illegally connected water and electricity, often with the knowledge and complicity of the landlords. This normalised illegality undermines governance and shifts risk onto tenants who have little power to challenge unsafe arrangements. Informality becomes the organising principle of everyday life.

Our landlord practices intersect with a profound failure of imagination and governance by the eThekwini municipality. Planning is reactive, enforcement is selective, and accountability is weak.

This failure is visible in the approval of retail and hardware developments next to Inanda police station, where superficial traffic adjustments were sanctioned at an already chaotic intersection. This intersection has been lamented for years by Msweli, the Ukhozi FM traffic presenter, although he makes wrong calls to the head of traffic police instead of the evidently indifferent head of planning. The problem is not ignorance. It is institutional indifference.

Without deliberate engagement between landlords, developers, the police, and the municipality, crime and grime in Inanda will continue to reproduce themselves. Disorder feeds violence. Neglect normalises criminality. Silence becomes complicity.

Everyone must be part of the solution. Landlords and developers cannot continue to moralise about crime while benefiting from the very conditions that sustain it. Inanda must not follow the path of rat-infested Alexandra in Johannesburg.

Bring back Sunbeam and pantyhose, make townships shine.