One Man, 76 Counts: Judgment Day for the Usindiso Fire That Shamed Johannesburg
Nearly three years after the deadliest building fire in South Africa's history, the Johannesburg High Court delivers judgment today on the only person ever charged for it. Sthembiso Mdlalose, now 33, faces 76 counts of murder, 12 of attempted murder and one of arson for the blaze that tore through the Usindiso building on Albert Street in the early hours of 31 August 2023. He once confessed to starting it. He has spent the years since insisting the confession was a lie.
For South Africans abroad, Usindiso was one of those stories that followed you into foreign living rooms: the night the world's cameras pointed at a five-storey building in Marshalltown and asked how, in a city with bylaws and inspectors and a government that owned the property, hundreds of people came to be living behind locked gates in a firetrap. Today the criminal half of that question gets an answer. The civic half remains unresolved.
The night of 31 August 2023
The fire broke out at about half past one in the morning in the Usindiso building at 80 Albert Street, a structure with its own cruel history: built in 1954 as the headquarters of Johannesburg's Non-European Affairs Department, the bureaucracy that enforced apartheid's pass laws. By 2023 it was city-owned, hijacked, and home to hundreds of residents, many of them migrants and asylum seekers, living in makeshift rooms behind flimsy partitions.
When the flames spread, those partitions and locked gates became the architecture of the death toll. Firefighters found bodies piled at a locked gate on the ground floor. Survivors described blocked exits and desperate leaps from windows to escape the smoke. At least 76 people died. Eighty-eight were injured.
The confession he wants back
The case against Mdlalose rests heavily on his own words. He admitted to igniting the blaze, then spent the trial fighting that admission, telling the court it was fabricated while he was under the influence of drugs and offered in exchange for food and shelter in custody. In May 2025, Judge Cassim Moosa ruled the confession admissible, finding it had been given freely and voluntarily. The National Prosecuting Authority has said the confession is, in any case, not the only evidence linking him to the crime.
Mdlalose himself has never wavered in public, and his statements from the dock have been striking.
With these hands, I've never even killed a bug.
"I've never dreamt of getting a verdict that is guilty. I've never dreamt wearing an orange uniform," he told reporters in June, as prosecutor Thami Mpekana's team waited out the second of two postponements. The court delayed judgment on 19 May and again on 3 June after Judge Moosa flagged discrepancies in the victims' post-mortem reports, a reminder that even the accounting of the dead in this case has been contested.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 31 Aug 2023 | Fire at 80 Albert Street kills at least 76, injures 88 |
| May 2024 | Khampepe commission's first report holds the City of Johannesburg accountable |
| 12 May 2025 | Mdlalose's confession ruled admissible |
| 19 May 2026 | Judgment postponed |
| 3 Jun 2026 | Judgment postponed again over post-mortem discrepancies |
| 21 Jul 2026 | Judgment due |
The verdict that already exists
Whatever Judge Moosa decides today, one verdict on Usindiso was delivered long ago. The commission of inquiry chaired by retired Constitutional Court Justice Sisi Khampepe found the City of Johannesburg accountable for the tragedy, citing gross negligence and bylaw violations in a building the city itself owned: doors welded shut, stairways barricaded, escape routes that led nowhere.
The commission's inspectors then looked past Albert Street at 110 other inner-city properties. What they found reads like a forecast.
Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi, receiving the commission's final report in July 2025, called the province's hijacked buildings "ticking time bombs." That phrase is doing a lot of work three years on, because almost every condition that made Usindiso lethal still exists a few blocks from the courtroom where its one accused waits for judgment.
What today settles, and what it cannot
If Mdlalose is convicted, sentencing follows separately, and the state will have secured accountability of a kind, though a single conviction cannot answer for a catastrophe with many authors. If he is acquitted, the question of who or what killed 76 people snaps back, in its entirety, onto the institutions the Khampepe commission already named. Survivors' groups have waited three years for this day; so have the families who buried their dead in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and across South Africa.
The three-year anniversary of the fire falls on 31 August. Between now and then, Johannesburg will learn whether its deadliest fire ends with a prison sentence, an acquittal, or the uncomfortable truth that both outcomes leave standing: the buildings are still there, the gates are still locked, and the city that owned Usindiso has yet to face a courtroom of its own.