KZN – a permanent disaster of a province

KWAZULU-NATAL has declared a provincial state of disaster to try to cope with the devastating floods of the past week.

But in KZN’s case, they might as well make it permanent. This is a province that has been on its knees for some time, and it ain’t getting up any time soon.

After all, KZN hasn’t even staunched the bloodied nose it suffered nine months ago. That’s when one wing of the ANC government – the Radical Economic Transformation followers of former president Jacob Zuma – tried to bury the other – the so-called reformists led by President Cyril Ramaphosa.

KZN hasn’t even properly tallied the body blows it suffered then. The official estimates for the insurrection were 45 000 businesses affected, R50 billion in economic damage, 129 000 jobs lost and 354 killed.

These estimates are probably on the low side. For example, the number of people who were killed in the mayhem doesn’t include the many whose bodies were simply never found and counted.

The true economic cost is incalculable. There’s been substantially increased migration of minorities, cancelled investments, and the loss of international confidence in KZN as a safe tourist destination. In at least a dozen country towns, all the business infrastructure was destroyed, paradoxically by the very people who worked and shopped in those buildings.

Now arrive the floods. The death toll is more than 300 and still rising. Some 6 000 homes have been destroyed and road, water, sewage and electrical infrastructure uprooted. As I write this, the occasional roaming mob is plundering container depots, stranded trucks, abandoned homes and vulnerable businesses, reportedly unhindered – as was the case during last year’s riots – by the police and army.

Naturally, no disaster is complete without a scapegoat. Ramaphosa was quick off the mark to finger the culprit – climate change.

“This disaster is part of climate change. It is telling us that climate change is serious, it is here,” Ramaphosa told reporters while inspecting a devastated Durban.

What balderdash. Whatever role climate change may or may not have played in the larger scheme of things, it’s nonsense to pin on it responsibility for the plight of KZN.

First, this was not an unforeseeable bolt from the heavens. The forecasters warned months back that this was likely to be an exceptionally wet summer because of the La Niña weather pattern that occurs every few years.

There are also historical precedents for extreme weather in KZN, which a prudent administration would have taken note of.

In 1984, Cyclone Demoina wreaked havoc in a swathe from Mozambique, through Swaziland to KZN. Although the current downpour is worse, the scale is in the same ballpark.

The true difference between those events, 38 years apart, lies in the lack of preparedness on the part of today’s authorities. In 1984 the SA Air Force deployed 25 helicopters to airlift people to safety. In the 2000 Mozambique floods, 17 SAAF helicopters rescued more than

14 000 people.

This time, according to media reports, the SAPS and the SAAF, combined, have been unable to put a single chopper in the air. The erosion of the military means that of the SAAF’s 39 Oryx helicopters, only 17 are serviceable.

Durban-based 15 Squadron has not a single helicopter available for search and rescue – they are reportedly primarily used as VIP transport. The SAPS airwing has only one serviceable helicopter, but “the pilot on duty has been booked off sick”.

Second, throughout the province, local government is also in a state of disaster and unable to do its job.

In Durban, the eThekwini metro is bloated and inert. It carries a rates and services debt of R17bn, of which R1bn is owed by the national government.

Durban is also infamously corrupt. Former mayor Zandile Gumede is facing fraud, corruption and money-laundering charges in connection with a R320 million municipal tender.

Yet at the weekend, even as the rain was bucketing down, she won the ANC’s regional leadership contest hands-down, despite the party’s supposed “step-aside when accused” rule.

It’s in KZN where the ANC’s brazen indifference to the law and antipathy towards the Constitution is at its most obvious and most destructive.

On Monday, Zuma’s corruption trial once again failed to take off in the Pietermaritzburg High Court when he blocked the process with another round of delaying legal actions. His lawyers also had some carefully threatening words for the judiciary in a separate Supreme Court of Appeal action.

They urged SCA President Mandisa Maya to reconsider the dismissal of his latest corruption prosecution challenges.

They warned that last year’s deadly July unrest was “in part, traceable to a perceived erroneous and unjust judicial outcome” that put Zuma briefly in prison for contempt of court.

“When such conceived mistakes are committed, the citizens (wrongly) feel entitled to resort to self-help.”

Floods, fires and locusts are devastating, but at least happen relatively rarely. The ANC, alas, is a seemingly unending plague.