KZN flood victims sleep outside in the rain after eviction from emergency housing

Seventeen people displaced by the April 2022 KwaZulu-Natal floods have been sleeping outside a building on Point Road in Durban since Monday. Photos: Tsoanelo Sefoloko.

For the past four nights, 17 people displaced by the April 2022 KwaZulu-Natal floods have been sleeping outside a building on Point Road in Durban. The group was evicted from temporary accommodation they had been living for more than three years.

The privately-owned building was one of several Temporary Emergency Accommodation facilities rented by eThekwini Municipality after the floods destroyed thousands of homes. Residents had been living there since December 2022 while waiting for permanent housing.

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Human Settlements bought Montclair Lodge from Transnet for R33-million. It was refurbished to house qualifying flood victims and other displaced people.

Municipal spokesperson Mandla Nsele said all temporary emergency housing occupants underwent a beneficiary verification process. Families at the Point Road building who qualified for housing assistance were relocated to Montclair on 28 and 29 June.

Following the screening process, 146 beneficiaries were found not to qualify for housing assistance because they exceeded the qualifying income threshold, had previously benefited from a government housing subsidy, or because their personal circumstances had changed.

Nsele said these people were issued with eviction notices in March 2026 and again in June. Many of those who got eviction notices left the building to rent backyard accommodation elsewhere. But the 17 people now sleeping outside told GroundUp they could not afford alternative accommodation or had nowhere else to go.

Nompumelelo Malemela and her eight-year-old son are among those sleeping outside the building. Malemela’s shack in Dakota informal settlement in Isipingo was washed away in the April 2022 floods.

Originally from the Eastern Cape, Malemela moved to Durban in 2017 to work as a domestic worker. She said she was excluded from the current housing assistance programme because she owns an RDP house in the Eastern Cape, where other members of her family now live.

“I received my eviction notice on 22 June, but I couldn’t return to the Eastern Cape because it was already the middle of the school year.

“My son is a learner at Addington Primary School. Moving him in the middle of the year would have been very difficult,” she said.

Malemela said they have to ask for water at a nearby garage and her son hasn’t attended school since they were evicted on Monday.

Xolani Mkhize, Point Road building manager, said he was told to lock the building because the municipality was no longer renting the property.

The occupants were evicted from the temporary accommodation where they had been living for more than three years. They say they have nowhere else to go.

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