A group of evicted KwaZulu-Natal flood victims were forced to sleep on the street on Monday night when other displaced people refused to let them back into a civic hall in Durban.

About 300 people, including women, the elderly, and children, were evicted from the Transnet building where they had illegally occupied a hostel for two weeks. This group, originally from Mega village in Umlazi and displaced during the floods, decided to move from Yellowwood Park civic hall into the then empty hostel in the Transnet building, known as the Montclair Lodge. This was an attempt to put pressure on the provincial government to speed up the process of moving them out of community shelters and allocate housing.

On Monday, the sheriff of the court, the police and private security executed an eviction order and the group was moved back to the hall they had come from.

But their fellow displaced flood victims, who declined to join them in the hostel invasion and chose to remain at Yellowwood Park, on Monday night refused to let them back in, according to ward councillor Gavin Hegter.

“We now have a situation where most of the people who were evicted from there [Montclair Lodge] have arrived at the Yellowwood Park hall and the people who had stayed behind and decided to follow the legal route and not take illegal occupation, are saying they don't want the people back.

“Unfortunately, the city's disaster management did not take part [in the eviction] though Montclair SAPS made every attempt to get them on board to try to place these people in proper facilities or take them back to where they come from.

“Now, there’s no control as to who actually used to live here and left and who has come back, because the disaster management team has those lists and they have not got involved at all,” Hegter said.

The flood victims who were locked outside, however, said the disaster management unit made the lists and the people inside the hall have them.

“They have the lists inside, not just one, with all our names in it. If they were to come with it and read the names in there you would find all of us in it, no-one here is not on those lists,” said Thulani Sindane.

Zama Mkhize said she was amazed that people they had lived with for four months claim to not know them just because they left for two weeks.

“What’s worse is that we were fighting for them also, because you can’t be happy living in a community hall for close to five months, that’s almost half a year. No-one comes to update you on what’s going on and you are happy with that.

“But if another bus comes in the morning and says we are going to occupy another place to fight for our rights, I will go there. They will have to lock me out again.”

Nokuthula Gumede just wanted a warm place for her baby to sleep.

“Are we turning into vagrants now? Sleeping on the streets now?

“If only they can accommodate my child, I can sleep peacefully on the street,” she told TimesLIVE.

At about midnight the group asked to light a fire in the empty parking space outside the hall to keep warm, but the metro police said that was not allowed.

“We now sit with this situation that is very volatile where the community of the area are saying ‘we don’t want hundreds of people moving back into our hall’ and the people who stayed in the hall saying ‘we stayed behind and followed the legal route and people who broke the law are now coming back and we don’t know who they are’. It’s a very difficult situation and I’ve handed over to metro police and public order policing to monitor the situation,” said Hegter.

TimesLIVE