Families who were moved for the 2010 World Cup are still living in their “transit camp”
Residents of KwaDabeka camp implore the eThekwini municipality to hear their pleas
Hundreds of families have been living in the KwaDabeka “transit camp” since 2009, when they were moved to make way for a 2010 World Cup training ground. Photo: Tsoanelo Sefoloko
Desperate families who have been living in the KwaDabeka “transit camp” since they were moved there to make way for the 2010 World Cup have implored the eThekwini municipality to hear their pleas to provide better housing.
Resident Thabile Nguse said the families had written several times to the municipality to no avail.
“The sad part about us is that we live next to the important Dumisani Makhaye Highway. Officials drive past here every day. I really don’t know what comes to their mind when they see the houses that we are living in,” said Nguse.
She said residents had sent another memorandum to the municipality last week.
In 2009, more than 600 families were moved nine kilometres to a transit camp to make way for a training ground for international clubs near Sugar Ray Xulu Stadium in Clermont, in preparation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
They were told the move would only be for six months.
GroundUp wrote about their conditions in November 2023. At the time there were just two flush toilets for 609 families. All the others were broken. Most of the homes had broken windows. People have used sandbags to prevent flooding and erosion under their homes.
Earlier this month the municipality finally provided mobile toilets, which are cleaned twice a week.
But the houses are still overcrowded, cracked and leaking. Some have been repaired by residents, although they say they have been told not to fix the houses themselves or to extend their homes.
Residents told GroundUp they felt they had been dumped.
Nguse said earlier this year a construction company had come to fix some of the houses but had left without completing the work.
EThekwini Municipality spokesperson Gugu Sisilana said the City had spent R11.6-million rehabilitating the Kwadabeka transit camp. Asked about the quality of the work, she said the materials used had been specified, engineers had been appointed to oversee the project and to make sure that all the materials used met quality control standards. Sisilana did not provide details of how the money was spent.
Support independent journalism
Donate using Payfast
Next: Langa families were moved to a “temporary” area in 2002. They are still there
Previous: In photos: Aftermath of Silvermine fire
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.