As a Durbanite, you can’t help but notice the slow but steady decline of our city. The rubbish piles up, infrastructure crumbles, and, most visibly, homelessness is on the rise. From the comfort of our middle-class lives, it’s easy to forget the ones who feel this decay most acutely—our city’s homeless, many of whom are young men from rural KZN hoping for work that doesn’t exist in a city that’s losing its economic pulse.
The situation is dire, but there’s a glimmer of hope with the recent shake-up at the top in eThekwini. At the Denis Hurley Centre, we’re cautiously optimistic that the new leadership will take homelessness seriously. The previous response from the Municipality? Well, it’s been… a bit hit or miss. Sure, there were some shining moments, like when eThekwini stepped up during the COVID lockdown, but those moments were few and far between.
On the flip side, we’ve seen millions spent on projects that go nowhere—like the expensive public toilets and showers for the homeless that are rarely working, or the years-long wait for proper sewage infrastructure in places like Dalton. And don’t get me started on the ill-fated attempts to “round up” homeless people during past administrations—spoiler alert: they came right back.
The city’s response often feels like neglect, or worse, like officials using the poor as a convenient excuse to attract donor money for vanity projects. The World Bank has been pulled in to help, but the facts on the ground often get muddied, with inflated numbers like “16,000 homeless” (when proper surveys say it’s closer to 4,000).
But let’s stay hopeful. With the right leadership, a true shift in how eThekwini approaches poverty and homelessness is possible. If we apply Gandhi’s test—”Will this help the poorest person we see?”—we may finally see a city where action matches the rhetoric.
For now, we’ll keep praying that this change isn’t just another false dawn. Here’s hoping the city’s new administrators apply some good sense and real compassion where it’s needed most.
Dr. Raymond Perrier is the Director of the Denis Hurley Centre.
Source Info: https://www.iol.co.za/news/opinion/homelessness-and-the-ethekwini-municipality-8bacafa3-5d3b-42af-b630-755d6877f872