Durban protesters block roads, demanding local clinic be re-opened
The Newtown A clinic has been closed since the floods in April 2022
Newtown residents protested on Monday morning, demanding that the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health re-open the local clinic, which has been closed since the floods in April 2022. Photo: Tsoanelo Sefoloko
Several roads in Newtown in Durban were blocked with burning tyres and rubble on Monday morning by protesters demanding that the clinic in Newtown A be reopened immediately.
Newtown A is about 23 kilometres from Durban’s city centre. The local clinic, which used to be open seven days a week, was closed after the devastating floods in April 2022. More than two years later, it is still closed and residents are demanding answers from the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health.
The nearest clinics are in Nozaza Clinic in Ntuzuma, some four kilometres away and in the Newtown C section, about six kilometres away.
Community leader Londiwe Mnguni told GroundUp that the structure of the clinic looks undamaged so it’s not clear to residents why it is still closed.
“We decided to block roads because it seems as if our ward councillors don’t want to listen to us. We have so many elderly people who can’t walk or take a taxi to the clinic,” said Mnguni.
Resident Ntombenhle Mkhize, used to work at the clinic as a cleaner. “Life was better while I was working at the Newtown A clinic because I worked close to home.” She said permanent staff had been placed at other clinics when the Newtown A clinic closed, but those working under contract like her had been forgotten.
Ward 55 councillor Siyabonga Mfeka said at a meeting on 3 August residents had agreed that within two weeks officials from the health department would address them.
“It is surprising that before the time frame that we agreed on, the residents decided to protest blocking most of the roads. I understand that the residents have been without a clinic for a very long time. I don’t blame them for showing their dissatisfaction, but they should have waited for the process,” said Mfeka.
Spokesperson for the KZN Department of Health Ntokozo Maphisa said the clinic had been badly damaged by the 2022 storms. Maphisa said the company appointed to rebuild it had abruptly withdrawn just before starting work. A new contractor would be announced “as soon as possible”.
“We appeal to the community to exercise patience and restraint as the process unfolds to build a new improved clinic,” Maphisa said.
Next: Housing bungle in Eastern Cape
Previous: Understanding the hard-hitting Press Council ruling against Iqbal Survé’s newspapers
© 2024 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.