Often the face of large-scale disaster, natural or otherwise, is that of poor folks who are most in need of state help. In SA, such a face is often black, after all, SA is a predominantly black African country.
But in many instances, thanks to apartheid spatial planning, the very poor, which reads black African, find themselves at the mercy of the elements when such disasters strike. And we have had a few of those over the past 18 months or so.
The riots in July 2021, from which the economy is still to fully recover, and the devastation of floods mainly in KZN and parts of the North West and Eastern Cape in April. After the natural disaster killed more than 400 people and caused infrastructural damage estimated at billions of rand, the national government announced R1bn disaster relief funds to help rebuild lives and infrastructure.
What followed has been a story all too South African, in as far as public funds are concerned: the people most in need of such funding have been left high and dry. This week the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) blamed what it termed “a lack of political will and government red tape” for delayed state response to the devastating floods.
Addressing parliament’s ad hoc joint committee on what the SAHRC made of the relief and recovery effort, commissioner Chris Nissen said: "We’ve warned from the beginning, the old issue of political will to implement and the red tape that prevents people, prevents officials from implementing speedily and rapidly to the needs and the crisis. This is what we found everywhere we went, in all the areas in KwaZulu-Natal.
"...You cannot, after six or seven months following a disaster, [have a situation where] people are still in halls. People are still looking for water," Nissen said. “In any disaster there must be political will to say, before something breaks out let’s assist our people.”
As our wretched luck would have it, another disaster – again manmade – is making the news this week, after the walls of a mine tailings dam gave in and flooded low-lying areas of Jagersfontein, in Free State, causing untold damage and loss of life.
We had hoped against hope that there were lessons learnt in the flood relief and effort, until Jagersfontein happened this week.
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