Dirty nappies, broken bottles, pizza boxes, maggots and cockroaches scuttling amid a foul stench. This is what welcomes people home at Garcia Flats every day.
Residents living in the municipal complex in Cambridge have not had their refuse collected for almost two months.
“This is not how you treat human beings. It is unacceptable that people have to live in this filth, it is a gross violation of human rights,” said DA ward 4 councillor Tessa Botha.
Botha receives a “stream” of complaints about the mounds of rubbish every day.
“It causes so many problems. There is an infestation of flies, maggots and rats. People can’t even cook in their own homes or leave their doors open because of the stink and they have cockroaches and maggots crawling into their houses.”
The Dispatch visited the area on Tuesday evening and found heaps of reeking rubbish strewn under the communal washing lines at the entrance to each block of flats. A vagrant was spotted scratching through the piles of rubbish.
The complex has only one communal garbage bin in the parking lot, which was also overflowing with waste.
Residents on the bottom floors in each section of the complex were the worst affected and vagrants regularly ripped the rubbish bags open, Botha said.
“It attracts so many pests and people just walk in and out tearing open the bags and just leave the rubbish lying around. It’s so unhealthy,” said resident, Sophia Minnie, who has been living in B Block, on the bottom floor, for more than 40 years.
“It’s very bad now, but there is always rubbish lying around. For more than two years now our rubbish has not been collected regularly.”
According to Botha, residents each pay R277 a month for refuse removal and, like all areas in Buffalo City, refuse should be collected once a week. She said attempts to get Buffalo City municipality’s solid waste department to resolve the issue were futile.
The excuses she was given by the department included a shortage of trucks due to broken-down vehicles and not having the capacity to deal with the backlog caused by the striking of municipal workers in 2018.
BCM spokesperson Samkelo Ngwenya had not responded to queries by the time of writing...