Owner of the Stone Crescent Hotel, Tariq Hayat, says a city official's claim that conditions there pose a serious health and safety risk are nonsense.
Owner of the Stone Crescent Hotel, Tariq Hayat, says a city official's claim that conditions there pose a serious health and safety risk are nonsense.
The hotel, 8km from Grahamstown on the N2 to Port Elizabeth, came under the spotlight following a march by students from Eastcape Midlands College two weeks ago.
They described their living conditions at the hotel as intolerable and demanded that the college move them, or act to improve things.
Questioned at the time about living conditions at his hotel, Hayat said a visit from a health inspector had shown nothing out of the ordinary.
However, after reading our article, ‘Students march 8km in N2 rumpus’ (Grocott's Mail, Friday 8 February, Page 11) Johan Esterhuizen, Chief Environmental Health Officer for Makana Municipality, called the newspaper to correct this.
“We [the environmental health service and a building inspector from the infrastructure department]went out to do the inspection at the hotel with Mr Hayat,” said Esterhuizen in a telephone call on Thursday.
“In the article it says we saw nothing out of order – that was incorrect. “There were a couple of things we were not happy with,” Esterhuizen explained.
He said they had sent Hayat a list of repairs that needed to be done urgently.
This list included blocked drains, faulty electrical points, toilets that did not work properly, and the murky, brown water.
Confronted last week with these fresh allegations, Hayat called them “nonsense”.
“Most of the toilets are brand new – out of the 40 or 50 toilets [Esterhuizen] tested, only two of them didn’t flush,” he told Grocott's Mail.
Students, who before the protest were sharing a four-person room between six people, also had to cook, wash, clean and iron in their rooms.
“[Those students] are friends and they chose to stay like that,” explained Hayat.
Esterhuizen, however, pointed this out as a serious health and safety risk.
“The hotel is not in a bad state – we’ve upgraded now, and it’s better than before,” Hayat said. “We’ve improved the ‘look’ of the hotel, and the paving is redone.”
