Keith Elliot : The rise of Waste Lords from the ashes of poor service delivery…

Lack of service delivery has spawned a new multi-million illegal industry run by Waste Lords. In this interview, Keith Elliott, the Director of the Kya Sands Burning Wasteland Community Forum, tells Chris Steyn how the illegal waste management industry got off the ground and how the Waste Lords operate. He describes lengthy battles with authorities, as well the current legal battles to try and save communities from the devastating effects. As for the link to corruption, he reveals: “…we’ve been approached by parties in the past. And the approach has been, if you come up with 100,000 Rand, we're quite sure that this problem can go away. So that's an indication at least that at some level, there may be political involvement or people in politics who are involved in this.” Meanwhile, the long-suffering community has managed to raise sufficient money to launch a pilot project for private security to help the authorities with enforcement. “..it is a disgrace that citizens have to resort to the court to get the authorities to do their job, but it's also a disgrace that the citizens have to resort to private security to get the enforcement right,” Elliot says..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Watch here.Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Chris Steyn (12:26.502)But you describe being practically extorted by somebody in politics to try and get you to pay for having this dealt with.Keith Elliott (12:40.492)Well, that is correct. the meeting that we held was with a third party. The person that was going to receive the money in order to make the problem go away was never named. But that's the offer that was made to us.Chris Steyn (00:01.028)Lack of service delivery has spawned a new illegal industry. We speak to Keith Elliott, the Director of the Kya Sands Burning Wasteland Community Forum. Welcome, Keith.Keith Elliott (00:18.114)Thank you, Chris.Chris Steyn (00:20.23)How did the illegal waste management industry get off the ground?Keith Elliott (00:27.608)So in our area, what happened was that there was a waste disposal site called the Kya Sand Waste Disposal Site in Kya Sands. And that was decommissioned in around 2010 and officially closed some time later. And then what happened was that criminal Elements, these Waste Lords, reopened the site and started accepting money from people looking to dump and essentially started an illegal waste…continued to use the site as an illegal commercial dump. And as a consequence of that, either those entrepreneurs or copycats invaded other land in the area and this little illegal industry in our area was spawned.Chris Steyn (01:18.652)What's the modus operandi of these Waste Lords?Keith Elliott (01:25.55)So the modus operandi is that they have marshals that work on the sites for them. When we did a study of this in 2023, we had up to 10 illegal sites. So they have a number of marshals on the waste dump. The people arrive with a truck full of waste. The waste is dumped in the designated spot. So the marshals will take them to the spot, tell them where to dump it. The waste is dumped. Money changes hands at that level, so between 200 and 500 rand per load. And then the waste is mined. And it's mined for recyclables, anything that can be resold or repurposed, it's mined. And then at the end of the day, in order to make space for the next day's loads, whatever is left and can't be salvaged or used is set alight.Chris Steyn (02:21.82)So what kind of wealth are these waste loads accumulating?Keith Elliott (02:29.038)It's very difficult for us to know exactly what kind of waste they're accumulating. But when we had those 10 dumps operating, and we also have an understanding that some of these Waste Lords are involved in selling parcels of land in the two informal settlements in the area. And we believe that they involved in the myriad hundreds and hundreds of illegal electricity connections. It could be anything between 10 and 20 million rand a year that this industry is generating.Chris Steyn (03:06.758)What effect has this had on the surrounding communities?Keith Elliott (03:15.246)So in the first instance, think whenever there's organised crime and whenever there are illegal activities, it immediately creates a security risk for the community. And that's particularly relevant in the South African context. However, the immediate impact is that when these dumps are smoldering, so now we have, at the moment we have four active dumps. When these dumps are burning in the evening, it creates these huge clouds of smoke which in and of themselves are an issue. But later in the evening when it cools down and we get the temperature inversion, that smoke is trapped closer to the ground. And we live in the … Valley and that smoke, as water does, runs down the valley and then affects the lives of about 150,000 people. So the complete combustion, when the flames are raging, creates smoke but it goes up. What happens at night is that the waste continues to smolder. And when the waste smolders in that way, it is incomplete combustion of the waste. And that means that you get compounds called dioxins released into the air. And these are volatile organic compounds, which are particularly dangerous. So not only do people cough and splutter, and they can't breathe, and they have asthma, and all of those kind of things. But these...These have been linked to reproductive disorders, hormone disorders, and even cancers.Chris Steyn (04:45.052)How long have you been engaging with the authorities to try and resolve this?Keith Elliott (04:54.19)So I arrived home one evening in March of 2020 in a cloud of this toxic smoke and I decided that I could no longer live with it. So I began engaging with the authorities in 2020.Chris Steyn (05:10.364)And what engagements have they been and what have been the results of your efforts?Keith Elliott (05:19.278)So it took us about a year to get to a point where we had any substantive response. So in the first couple of months, we had Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, as well as representatives from the City of Johannesburg, specifically Pickitup, which is a waste management company. We had low-level visits, site visits from those two entities. And they would...email us afterwards and say we're going to take action. Then we just saw absolutely nothing happen. We managed … the details of the Chairman of the Audit and Risk Committee of Pickitup at some point. And when we did that, we finally started to get some action on this. So in August of 2021, the Chief Executive of Pickitup, the Chairman of the board at the time, the Chairman of the Audit and Risk Committee and one other non-executive chairman and non-executive board member as well as the almost the full executive if Pickitup, did a site visit with us. And we stood on top of the dumps….had private security, they had SAPS and they had JMPD protecting us. And we walked onto the dumps, we scared away the marshals and they stood on top of those dumps and gave us an undertaking that everything would be sorted out. And of course, if you've got the Chairman of the board and the CEO telling you everything's going to be fine, you believe it. The next important thing that happened was in January of 2022, we had a site of a document published by City of Johannesburg, Environment, Infrastructure and Services Department, they call themselves EISD. They published a comprehensive 30-page action plan, which was a multi-work stream and multi-interdepartmental initiative to address the problem. So fully acknowledging that we have this industry of illegal dumping and undertaking to fix it. But by the middle of the following year, by the middle of 2023,Keith Elliott (07:40.974)…notwithstanding us cajoling them and asking them to really implement this action plan, they didn't. And that was when we were lucky enough to come across a law firm that would be happy to act for us pro bono. We formed a non-profit company and we began to address this through the courts.Chris Steyn (08:00.86)Okay, that's what I have wanted to ask you. What legal actions are you now embroiled in?Keith Elliott (08:09.498)So the first thing we needed to do was we needed to prove to the court that there were issues to do with air quality. Our legal team advised us that it's not sufficient to just show pictures and videos of people dumping illegally, that we needed to prove the air quality issue. So our first court action, which ended in August of 2024, was to get the court to compel the City of Johannesburg to do air quality testing, comprehensive air quality testing. So we succeeded in that and our court order was granted. But unfortunately for us, the City of Johannesburg met, did not meet the first deadline for delivering the results, which was supposed to be April of 2025. And neither did they meet the extension that we gave them to July of 2025. So that...those court ordered air quality tests are still being conducted at the moment. They started with them on the 28th of August, and we expect the results probably sometime around the end of the first quarter of next year. So that's the first legal challenge that we've made. Then in September of this year, we launched another notice of motion. And in that, we've cited 13 different entities from national down to local government, including the Presidency, Cooperative Governance at both provincial level and at national level, Commissioner of Police, Minister of Police, Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, as well as many of the city organs, including JMPD, Pickitup and the City Manager. And what we're demanding from them is that within 120 days, they have done a comprehensive assessment of the situation, that they have devised an action plan to comprehensively fix the matter, and that they have started to implement that action plan. And the reason it's such a comprehensive legal action and it includes all of those entities is that this is a big problem. It's a large area. There are at least four access roads into it. We have at least four active dumps.Keith Elliott (10:31.554)So it will take more than just JMPD or City of Joburg to deal with it. That's been proven now.Chris Steyn (10:40.326)Now we've heard a great deal about police and political capture of late. Do these Waste Lords have unofficial official protection? Are they linked to corruption?Keith Elliott (10:54.894)So Chris, I can only tell you anecdotally that we've been approached by parties in the past. And the approach has been, if you come up with 100,000 Rand, we're quite sure that this problem can go away. So that's an indication at least that at some level, there may be political involvement or people in politics who are involved in this.We also know that the City of Johannesburg's JMPD vehicles regularly patrol the area. I have personally observed them stopping vehicles clearly, laden with waste that's going to the dump. The JMPD officer approaches the vehicle. There's an exchange of documents and if I want to be charitable, I'm going to tell you that maybe the license was being checked, but one can deduce whatever one wants from seeing that interaction. The truck then just goes on its way, does its dumping and leaves the area. So that's stuff that I have certainly observed myself. whether there's only petty corruption at the level of JMPD officers or whether there is high level corruption, you know, we can only speculate and I can, you know, can, the viewers can make their own deductions from what I've described and seen and heard and experienced myself.Chris Steyn (12:26.502)But you describe being practically extorted by somebody in politics to try and get you to pay for having this dealt with.Keith Elliott (12:40.492)Well, that is correct. the meeting that we held was with a third party. The person that was going to receive the money in order to make the problem go away was never named. But that's the offer that was made to us.I can just add another anecdote.Chris Steyn (12:59.46)And how did you respond?Keith Elliott (13:04.558)Well, sorry Chris, our response to that was we rejected it out of hand. We ended the meeting right there and then. I think that acceding to those demands is playing into the already existing organised crime problems that we're having in this country. As an organisation, we're not interested in being involved in that.Chris Steyn (13:30.704)You were going to share another anecdote, Keith.Keith Elliott (13:35.34)Yes, thank you, Chris. Just the fact that JMPD patrol vehicles from outside of our region…so Johannesburg is broken up into different regions, and the region is, the designation of the region is on the JMPD vehicles. We know that JMPD vehicles from outside of our region come into this area in Kya Sands, stop next to the road and stop vehicles, which is highly irregular and it actually cannot be explained why they do that other than this is potentially quite a lucrative place for corrupt JMPD officers to increase their income.Chris Steyn (14:18.064)Hmm to get bribes. Keith Elliott (14:22.676)Well, it certainly looks that way to us.Chris Steyn (14:25.488)Hmm. Well, you've fought a really long battle. How optimistic are you of succeeding with legal action?Keith Elliott (14:37.774)Yeah, it has been a long struggle and I must mention that I'm not doing this on my own. There's a community behind us. We have a petition, an online petition that 11,600 people have signed. We have a WhatsApp group that includes over 1,600 people. We've raised a significant amount of money over time from the community. So this is not me on my own. I've got a great group of people that operate with us.Just in terms of our optimistic, we have to be optimistic Chris. We have to believe that the rights of the ratepayers and the community are going to prevail here and that ultimately the courts are going to give us a result. The problem is that it does take a long time. We already have received notice from our legal team that some of the parties cited in our most recent court action have given notice of their intention to oppose our motion. So I think, you know, that beggars belief, I can see you raising your eyebrows and that's exactly how we feel about it. It's unbelievable to think that any of these government entities would oppose this. You would think that they would just be saying, let's not go to court, let's settle this, let's get an agreement together, let's take it to court, let's it made in order of court, because that would be our requirement. That's not the case. So it does appear as if we're going to go to court, but we have to be positive and we have to believe that we'll prevail.Chris Steyn (16:13.038)Is there any way that you can lay criminal charges in certain cases?Keith Elliott (16:20.088)So absolutely, that is certainly part of our plan. Just the legal team have got to get to one thing at a time, but it's certainly on a list of things that we can do.Chris Steyn (16:31.185)In conclusion, Keith, there anything else you'd like to add?Keith Elliott (16:36.706)Yeah, let me just describe to you the most recent thing that the community has done. So we know that, and you've already alluded to it, we've been at this a long time and we think it's going to take us a while longer to get this right. The fact is that the community have decided that we need some action now. So we've raised sufficient money to...run a pilot project for private security to help the authorities with enforcement. So we have checkpoints in the area, at four points in the area, and we also have a patrol vehicle that's in the area. Our eyes and ears on the ground of the community. We're talking to those teams about when trucks are seen coming into the area. We're pointing out where they're dumping and so forth. So this has been running since the 26th November and it really is making a difference. And I think two reasons I wanted to tell you. The first one is that it not only is it a disgrace that citizens have to resort to the court to get the authorities to do their job, but it's also a disgrace that the citizens have to resort to private security to get the enforcement right. And it's remarkable how easy this has been. We've already made a massive impact on the dumping and the burning in the area in a couple of days with this security solution. So those things are really important for people to know that we've been forced into this situation where we are doing this. So they're acting in concert with JMPD. They're going to do raids with JMPD. The idea is not some kind of vigilante justice. They alert JMPD to the issues. They've got number plate recognition technology. So this is really the citizens employing private security to do what JMPD and SAPS should be doing.Chris Steyn (18:35.388)Well, that was Keith Elliott, the director of Kya Sands Burning Wasteland Community Forum, speaking to BizNews about the Waste Lords. Thank you, Keith. I'm Chris SteynKeith Elliott (18:51.278)Thank you, Chris.

Keith Elliot : The rise of Waste Lords from the ashes of poor service delivery…

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